Dead Languages
by kerlin
Summary: [casefile] A murder in a museum related to one of Las Vegas's first families has the team walking on political eggshells.
1. Prologue

**Rating:** PG-13  
**Summary:** A murder in a museum related to one of Las Vegas's first families has the team walking on political eggshells.  
**Spoilers:** Given that I had only seen up to "Justice is Served" when I started this, there won't be any past that, and you can consider this set in late first season.  
**Disclaimer:** Not mine, just borrowing. I'll put them back when I'm done.  
**Author's Note:** Huge, huge thanks to elishavah and buggs for the beta and the continuity stick. 

* * *

_Prologue_

Walter Green slid his glasses upward and pinched the bridge of his nose, spreading his fingers out from there to run a palm over his face. The glasses dropped back down to the tip of his nose and he pushed them into place with an exasperated gesture, dropping his pen and leaning back with a creak in the leather chair. 

He glared balefully at the sheet of paper for a few seconds and then leaned forward to tap a button on the phone to the right of the desk blotter.

"Holly," he said when the speakerphone clicked on, "has Tom finished running the projected banquet costs yet?" His eyes snuck back to the aggravating columns in front of him while he waited for his secretary's answer.

He didn't have to wait long. "Not yet, Mr. Green. He hasn't gone home yet; I'll tell him that you're looking for them."

Walter opened his mouth to thank her, but changed his mind when the digital clock on the phone display flicked to a new minute. "It's past ten o'clock. Tell him to go home and that I'll be looking for them in the morning." Tom Daley had a new baby at home. The entire staff had been working until nearly midnight every night, and while Walter had nothing more exciting to go home to than a nightcap of Scotch and late-night television, he understood that most of the dedicated men and women he worked with had been suffering under the strain.

_Only a few days more,_ he told himself, as Holly acknowledged his message for Tom. Setting the budget sheet aside as the speakerphone clicked off, he pulled another document onto the blotter and uncapped a red pen.

_...leaving behind her a collection of objects and documents whose value..._

He paused and struggled for a word. Something else was missing. Ah - he arrowed in the word "historical" in front of value and nodded to himself.

_...whose historical value is beyond measure. On February 15, 2004, the 90th anniversary of Ms. Galliard's arrival in Las Vegas, our museum will open its doors to the public with a day of..._

A day of what? The only phrase that came to mind what the staff had been referring to it as for weeks - the Big Day.

"I hate press releases," Walter muttered to no one in particular, and squinted at the blank line, trading his red pen for a black one to pick up where he had left off the last time he had tried to finish the release. Procrastination time was over; there were two dozen news organizations that would be looking for the final copy to appear in their fax machines by noon tomorrow to make the weekend highlights.

Celebration, he decided, and made a strong mental note to run the text past Holly before sending it out to the newspapers in the morning. She had an English degree, didn't she? Or comparative literature. Or something like that. Either way, he was very sure she would be able to come up with a better word than celebration.

He was crossing the t in the word with a quick gesture when the shot rang out, and he started so violently that the fountain pen blotted out the rest of the word. He didn't notice - he threw the pen down and ran out of the room, finding Holly already standing with her mouth open.

"What was that?" he asked, because there was always a chance that it wasn't what he thought it was. The sound of a gunshot was something that didn't belong in the administrative offices of a museum.

She didn't answer and shook her head, her eyes wide and lips still forming an o. Walter pushed past her small desk and out into the hall.

"Tom," he said in surprise. The younger man was dressed in his overcoat against the chill of a desert night, and holding a briefcase in his right hand. He swallowed convulsively.

"I was down in the Blue Room, I wanted to run a final checklist on the interactive displays," he explained in a rush. "Please tell me that wasn't what I thought it was."

Walter shrugged and spread his hands apart and realized in that moment that if they were going to go find out where a gunshot had come from he didn't want to do so unarmed. He looked around and came up with nothing but the umbrella just inside of Holly's anteroom, which in the cramped confines of the museum's office space doubled as a copy room and coat closet, just as she served as administrative assistant for all senior staff.

He would have felt more than slightly foolish if he hadn't felt an overwhelming sense of fear, and nodded at Tom, who set his briefcase down. Together, they went down the hall, checking rooms as they went. Laura had brought her work home to tend to a sick child, and her office was dark and undisturbed. The small kitchen and break room was open and lit, but that was to be expected. No one was in the room and Walter doubted anyone had been there since he had poured himself a cup of coffee from the nearly empty pot half an hour ago. Geoffrey's office was closed and locked, and Walter knew it would be before he even tried the handle.

The final door in the hallway was slightly ajar, and his pace quickened, Tom behind him, as he reached the end of the hall and pushed it open.

Louis Cavrel lay face-first on the floor, his blood seeping into the thick carpet. Walter felt the bile rise in his throat as he stared at the body. A small part of his mind remembered the crime dramas he watched on midnight reruns and decided that the back of the skull - or what was left of it - must have been the exit wound. He had never imagined brain matter could...explode like that.

Behind him, Tom gave in to his body's revolt and emptied his stomach contents in the hall, but the noise was tinny and far-off in Walter's ears. The umbrella slipped from his nerveless fingers and fell to the carpet with a dull thud. He swallowed hard against his gag reflex, determined not to vomit as well, and was finally able to tear his eyes away from Louis's body.

"Holly - call 911!"

* * *


	2. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

He edged out into the hall cautiously, 9mm Baretta braced in front of him with a full clip, ready to fire. Another sidestep and he was in the clear and running toward the large open room where he could remember seeing the Glock - 

Red washed over his vision as he was shot repeatedly in the back, and his assassin crowed his superiority.

Nick pumped his fist into the air as Warrick pushed the game controller away in frustration. "I hate playing Golden Gun," he grumbled.

"I do believe that's five in less than two minutes, Warrick my man," Nick said smugly, putting down his own controller and letting his player idle while the screen asked Warrick if he wanted to continue or quit.

Dark hair swung into Nick's field of vision. "He wouldn't have fallen in that position if he'd been running," Sara observed in a matter of fact voice.

He stared at her in disbelief while Warrick rolled his eyes behind her back. On the screen, the body and the bloodstain under it faded away.

"And now the evidence is gone," Warrick said, standing and stretching to pop his back out. "The perfect crime."

Sara frowned, and leaned closer as if to examine the crime scene on the television. Nick flicked the off switch and received an annoyed noise. "It's a video game, Sara. Virtual homicide only."

She shrugged and returned to her seat, resettling the academic journal in her lap and picking up where she'd tucked her finger into the binding.

Nick slid the controllers and the game system back under the small television and turned his chair slightly to face the table again. He tipped backward and opened the door to the fridge, fishing for a can of soda. Warrick watched him from across the table, an eyebrow quirked, as Nick nearly lost his balance but managed to shut the door to the fridge and right himself, Coke triumphantly clutched in his hand.

"What are you, twelve?" Catherine asked as she breezed past him to the coffee pot. She'd come in during his stunt and had waited for him impatiently so that she could get to the counter.

"Hey, that takes skill!" he protested.

"Yeah, right," Warrick joined in, and Nick snuck a glance at Sara to see if he would have at least one ally. Her brow was furrowed and it was obvious she had no idea what was going on outside the edges of the journal. Nope, nothing from that corner. He decided a subject change would be a safe bet.

"How's the blood spatter analysis in the Loring case coming, Catherine?" he asked, his tone probably a bit too bright.

She pushed a breath out through her lips and shook her head, hair settling softly, as she sat down next to him. Her hands were wrapped around the mug to absorb its warmth. "There's still the void that can't be accounted for, and no one's talking. The evidence isn't pointing toward any third party involvement, but..." She rolled a shoulder, and Warrick nodded.

"Unanswered whys," he agreed. Across the room, Sara's eyes flicked up above the top of the journal for a brief moment and returned to the article, and Nick was annoyed. She had been paying attention after all.

"Exactly," Catherine replied, and sipped the coffee. The room was silent for a few moments until Nick popped the can of soda open and swallowed some of the welcome caffeine.

~*~

Sara flipped the page and tucked her foot more securely under her, staring intently at the magnified bullet casings pictured on the top of the page. The caption explained the differences, but she disregarded it, cataloguing the stress marks in her mind as if she were the CSI on the case instead of the author of the article.

"Good magazine," Grissom commented, leaning over slightly to read the cover, and she set it down in her lap to offer him a smile. _Applied Psychodynamics in Forensic Science_.

"Yeah, well, I heard the content was good," she quipped back, and the edges of her her mouth twitched into something approaching a smirk.

He responded by raising his eyebrows the tiniest bit, and moved to the table. She followed him, sitting next to Warrick and across from Catherine, the journal left behind in the chair.

"We're all together tonight," Grissom announced as he set the sole assignment slip on the table. "419 at the Galliard Museum."

"Never heard of it," Catherine replied, taking the assignment slip and reading the basic information. "It doesn't look complicated enough to need all of us..." She left the sentence hanging in the air when Grissom's gaze chided her for pre-evaluating. "Right."

"It's a high profile case. The museum is set to open in less than a week - the Galliards are one of Las Vegas's first families." He glanced down at his cell phone, obviously having already received several calls from the sheriff that night, and rose. Sara shadowed him, flanking on the left side as Warrick continued along his left and Catherine and Nick brought up the rear.

"Rose Galliard," Warrick added, nodding in understanding. "Big money. There was some kind of scandal when she died - what, five, six years back?"

"Six," Grissom confirmed. "Her will called for a large portion of her money to go toward the establishment of the Galliard Foundation, to research and promote the history of Las Vegas. The Galliard Museum was one of the stated goals of the foundation. The family made several objections."

"Victim is a Louis Cavrel," Catherine read from the slip.

"Director of the Galliard Foundation," Grissom filled in as they reached the doors. "See you there."

~*~

"Is this how you found him?" Grissom asked Walter, who shook his head.

"Yes - well, maybe a little more to the left. The paramedic moved him to take his pulse," Walter stammered.

Grissom muttered something under his breath about amateurs and crime scenes, and Sara bit her lip to keep from smiling from where she was crouched by the body. "We've got a murder weapon," she confirmed, bagging the revolver, careful to touch it as little as possible. "It's been fired recently and it looks like there's drawback - close proximity shooting. Probably find powder burn around the entry wound." Given that the body was still facedown in the thick carpet, there were any number of things they might find on the front side that would have to wait for the coroner.

"And a bullet," Catherine called, prying the half-flattened piece of metal out of the center of a thin mist of blood patterned against the wall behind the body. "Looks like a nine millimeter." She dropped the bullet into an evidence bag, sealed and signed it, and put it to the side to begin photographing the blood spatter.

Grissom nodded at her and gestured to the object that Nick was currently photographing, addressing his words to Walter. "The umbrella?"

"I dropped it there. When we heard the gunshot - I don't know, I just grabbed something in case I needed to protect myself. I dropped it when we found the body." Walter wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Tom - Tom Daley, he was with me - he threw up in the hall."

"But you didn't touch anything, right?"

Walter shook his head vehemently. "No. It was pretty obvious he was dead. There didn't seem much point to checking. I yelled for Holly to call 911 and we both left."

"Okay." Grissom gestured to the uniformed officer standing outside the door. "We're going to need to get a statement for the record, so if you'll accompany this officer out..."

"Sure." Walter stared at the body for a few more seconds, and shuddered, turning on his heel to follow the officer back down the hall.

Next to Sara, Warrick lifted the last of the shoeprints from the thick carpet. He had marked more than a dozen different types before any of the other CSIs had entered the room. It would be hit or miss on the match; with an office this public, any number of people had perfectly non-lethal reasons to be in the room. But taken as circumstantial evidence, it would add weight to a case.

"Find anything?" Grissom squatted down next to Sara as she methodically combed Cavrel for any evidence.

She shook her head. "We'll have to wait for the coroner's report." She rose along with Grissom and prepared to move on to the next section of the room to search it for evidence.

Across the room, Nick let out a whoop. "Jackpot!" He had finished taking the crime scene photographs and was examining the broken window - identified on the first walkthrough as a point of exit.

Sara and Grissom moved over to Nick as he held up a tuft of black fiber in tweezers. "From our suspect's clothing - it was caught on one of the pieces of glass. Looks like he caught it, either when he was breaking the glass or when he was leaving." He dropped it into an evidence bag.

Sara leaned over to peer out the window. "Concrete. Too bad. What about the security camera?" She pointed to the electronic device where it sat perched on the wall not far from the office windows.

"They were working out bugs in the system and took all the external security cameras offline earlier this afternoon to wait for tech support to come fix the problem in the morning," was Grissom's regretful response.

"Bummer."

"Unless you need any more help here, I'm going to head back to the lab and get started on the shoeprints," Warrick called from the door, camera in hand.

"I'll head back with you," Catherine called, taking one last swab from the blood on the wall. "First call is that it's a simple high-velocity spatter." Her tone suggested that she still wanted to know why they were all working the case, but she didn't voice her objections and followed Warrick out of the room.

Sara moved to the fireplace and was immediately surprised. "This is still warm," she remarked. "Did they say anything about a fire going when they came in?"

Grissom shook his head and spoke out loud when he realized her back was turned to him. "No. There's nothing in their statement about it."

She reached for her evidence kit and pulled out a thermometer, taking readings and doing some quick calculations in her head. "It's been out for maybe an hour. That would put it consistent with the time of the murder."

"Maybe it blew out," Nick suggested from where he was still working on the window, dusting for fingerprints. "There's a pretty strong wind tonight. When he broke the window a gust could have come in."

"The fire wouldn't have been going very strong," Sara mused, and sifted through the ash carefully. "Hello, what's this?"

She picked the corner of paper out of the fireplace with tweezers and brought it closer. Grissom squatted down next to her, as close as he could get without actually touching her. "There's something written on it...and that's not English."

"It's Latin," Grissom breathed at the same time she recognized the words. He beat her to the translation: "All my...it's cut off."

"And people say Latin is a dead language," she said and ignored Nick's groan from behind her. She turned the paper to view it from a new angle, reaching out absentmindedly for her evidence kit and was surprised when the small hand magnifying glass was placed into her hand before she was able to grab it. She looked in confusion, and Grissom smiled at her. 

"Looks like I'm a step ahead this time."

She quirked a smile back, and studied the paper. "High quality paper, ink's from a fountain pen or something similar. I'd say it's not new paper, either. We're lucky the fire went out; if it's old, it would have been dry enough to burn quickly." She slid the charred paper into an evidence bag and began to re-sift through the ash, concentrating on finding more pieces of paper. She was able to isolate two more shreds, both smaller than the original piece, and one of them without any writing at all.

Meanwhile, Grissom was sifting through the papers on the desk, careful not to displace anything too much as he read through them. "There's nothing too remarkable here - an itinerary for the next day, a few to do lists, financial statements..."

His voice trailed off in mid-sentence, just as she was bagging the last piece of paper, and Sara turned around to see what had happened. She saw Nick staring bemusedly as Grissom went down on his hands and knees and crawled into the knee space under the desk.

"Uhhh...Grissom?" she asked, standing next to Nick and crossing her arms, careful not to let her gloves touch her sleeves.

He backed out as hastily as he had entered and stood up. "Point of disturbance," he said, gesturing.

"Under the desk?" Nick asked incredulously, and sighed at Grissom's no-nonsense look. "You're smaller, Sara."

She opened her mouth to protest before realizing it was true. Nick wouldn't be able to maneuver his bulk in the small knee space and take a picture. "Fine," she said, retrieving a camera. "What am I looking for?" she asked as she put her head under the desk.

"Upper right hand corner," Grissom's voice answered, sounding odd from so far above her.

"Upper right hand corner..." She flopped over onto her back and immediately regretted it as the air was driven from her lungs by the impact. "Oof, okay," she said to herself when she could breathe again, flicking the flashlight on and scanning the corner. "Look at that."

"Look at _what_?" Nick's voice came, frustrated.

"The wood's splintered, and it's fresh." She twisted around and scanned the rest of the knee space quickly, making sure she wouldn't disturb anything if she braced herself to take photos. Finding nothing, she tried to angle herself and the camera to adequately photograph the scene. When she was done, she held the camera out under the desk until someone took it from her, and examined the splinter more closely.

"Wait - there's something else here." Looking very closely, she was able to discern that the wood was splintered along an thin line that continued the width of the knee hole and perhaps ten centimeters back toward the seat. "I think it's a secret compartment." She returned to the original point of disturbance and grinned triumphantly.

Squirming, she slid a small evidence bag and pair of tweezers out from her utility belt and plucked the fiber off the wood splinter. "I've got fiber," she announced.

"Stealing my thunder, Sidle?" Nick asked mournfully.

"You only wish you'd had some to begin with, Stokes," she snarked back, sliding the evidence bag into a pocket.

"Nicky, don't you have prints to lift?" Grissom's voice was slightly aggravated, and Sara swallowed her snicker and concentrated on the secret compartment.

"I think it's a false bottom," she narrated for Grissom, and prodded it gently. "No obvious opening mechanism, which makes sense. It's supposed to be secret."

"We'll have it taken back to the lab," he said, and she slid backwards, forcing him to step to the side quickly to get out of her way.

"Do I get to take it apart?"

"If you like."

"Bonus," she grinned, looking down at the desk and already planning its demise.


	3. Chapter 2

_Chapter 2_

"God, what a mess," Brass observed, surveying the room where all of the museum personnel working overtime that night were assembled. Police were still searching the rest of the large museum and conducting preliminary interviews. He crossed his arms across his chest.

"We'll need everyone's prints and shoe treads," Grissom said to the air, looking at the exhausted staff members in the conference room.

"Shoes," Sara called, and Nick rolled his eyes at her as she left to go get material from the Tahoe.

His attention was drawn to two young women entering, looking badly shaken and escorted by two officers. They were steered toward seats and an officer came to Brass. "They were working in the archives - in the basement. It's a temperature controlled vault; no one knew they were working down there and they didn't hear the commotion upstairs. We scared them half to death."

"That's Constance Galliard," Grissom observed, surprise in his voice.

Brass snorted. "Rubbing elbows with the lower classes."

"Didn't she get married last year?" Nick asked, his eyes on the lithe, fragile-looking blonde woman as she comforted the darker haired girl beside her.

"Oh yeah," Brass remembered, and gave Nick a sidelong glance that contained a world of questions about why the CSI was following the society pages. "Splashy society deal. I think the sheriff was there. The husband's a big East Coast money guy. He's related to the Kennedys or something."

"The Lowells," Grissom supplied, and Nick and Brass both turned to stare at him. "Same family as the poets. To know Las Vegas..."

"...is to know its celebrities," Brass finished, sending his eyes skyward in a plea for patience. "Poets?"

Grissom shrugged, obviously not willing to get into a discussion of American literature at that moment.

Sara returned with the fingerprinting and shoeprinting kits, and Nick began the familiar song and dance, almost unconsciously keeping an eye focused on Constance Lowell. By the time he had printed four of the museum staff, there was a commotion near the two young women who still sat closely together. It looked like the officers were trying to take Constance away for an interview and she was flatly refusing.

"Is there a problem here?" Nick asked, and tried to concentrate on something other than how beautiful Constance was.

"I'm not leaving Heather," she said, and the force of her tone was at odds with her thin appearance.

"Ma'am, as I already explained to you..." the officer began again, and Nick held his hand up to ask him to stop.

"It's a standard, required interview, Mrs. Lowell," he said cautiously, noting the way her lips pressed tightly together at the use of her name. "One of the officers will stay here with - Heather, and she'll be fine."

"She doesn't understand what's going on," Constance said stubbornly.

Nick furrowed his brow and turned to the girl - she couldn't be more than halfway through college. He knelt down so he was level with her. "Heather?" She didn't answer, and looked up at Constance quickly.

"She's deaf, Officer," Constance snapped, and Nick felt approximately two inches tall.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Lowell, I didn't realize," he said abashedly. "And I'm not a police officer - I'm a crime scene analyst. Nick Stokes," he added belatedly.

"Well, Mr. Stokes," she said acidly, "Heather is still learning how to read lips and I don't know the right words in sign language to explain to her what's happened. I'm not leaving her alone."

"I think we can help. I'll be right back." He rose and jogged to the front of the room, where Grissom was talking with Walter Green about securing blueprints of the museum.

"Grissom - the girl who's with Constance Lowell is deaf. She can't read lips. Can you..." Nick floundered, realizing he was in uncharted waters. He'd heard from Sara and Warrick that Grissom knew how to sign, but presuming on a skill his boss had yet to explain was suddenly crossing into the personal, and he wasn't at all sure that Grissom would appreciate the reference.

Much to his relief,, Grissom nodded and added a few final words to Walter, who nodded in understanding. He followed Nick to the back of the room. "What's her name?"

"Heather," Nick answered as they drew closer to the two women and the waiting officers.

"Hi, Heather," Grissom said as he signed. "How are you?"

Her eyes lit up and she signed a flurry of gestures back. Grissom smiled and held his hands out in the universal gesture to slow down, adding something else. She nodded and started again, more slowly this time.

"Heather, Louis Cavrel was shot tonight," he told her, obviously answering her pleas to find out what was going on. He shook his head in answer to her next round of queries. "No, I'm afraid he's dead."

The words produced a stunning effect, as Heather gasped and tears filled her eyes. Her hands trembled as she asked what Nick guessed were demands for details, and Grissom shook his head in response.

"The evidence will tell us," he told her, "and we need your help, too. The officers are going to question Mrs. Lowell, and then they'll want to talk to you too. I'll come in with you."

Heather paused, and then added something with a slight smile. Grissom smiled and signed something quick back, and from what Nick could tell he was spelling something out - his name? And then he added one faster gesture, and a series of explanations, which Heather grinned at and replied to.

One of the officers waiting to question Constance cleared his throat in an annoyed sound, and Grissom turned slowly to fix him with a stare, and then turned to Constance. "Mrs. Lowell, I'll stay with Heather. You don't need to worry."

Constance smiled in relief and signed something quickly to Heather that the younger woman responded to with shooing gestures.

Nick watched the officers walk away with Constance and looked back at Grissom and Heather to see his boss looking at him with an expectant face.

"Right - yeah - prints," he said, and returned to where he'd left off.

~*~

_You sign very well_, Heather told him, a shy smile on her face.

_My mother was deaf_, Grissom answered her, unconsciously mouthing the words. _I'm a little rusty._

_Practice,_ she signed back.

_Are you a student at the Gilbert College?_ he asked. _Dr. Gilbert is a friend of mine._

Heather bobbed her head. _I'm in my third year. I'm doing an -_

_I didn't understand the last word_, Grissom confessed. _A new word?_

_I - N - T - E - R- N - S - H - I - P,_ she spelled out, and he decided that it was a word that must have come into common vocabulary since he'd first learned sign language. _I'm a history major. I work in the archives._

_Peaceful,_ he told her, thinking that for an historian, an archival job must be the scientific equivalent of pure lab work, something he had always loved.

_Quiet,_ she signed back with a smirk, and he chuckled, watching her explain further with an ironic tone to her gestures._ I haven't always been deaf. I chose archival work before I went deaf. Because it was quiet._

He nodded, and conveyed his understanding. _What I like best is when I'm alone with my research, too. I'm a forensic entomologist, _he explained, and it was his turn to spell out the term for her to understand. _I study bugs and I use them to help solve crimes._

_Like murder,_ she signed back sadly.

_Yes,_ he said, and projected a reassuring air. _We will find who did this._

_I believe you,_ she said, and the confidence in her eyes was total.

~*~

"What's Grissom doing?" Sara murmured when she and Nick crossed paths.

"The girl is deaf," he explained. "She can't read lips."

"Ah," Sara answered, and felt a pang of - something, that she pushed down quickly. "Look, I'm almost done here," she said, adding in an aside to the current staff member to stand and put weight down on the sliver of plastic.

"Grissom was getting blueprints from Walter Green before he had to go help with Heather," Nick suggested, "you can go follow up on that."

"You're taking that CSI III authority to your head, Nicky," she said, but stood and moved onto the next person. "I'll go find him when I'm finished."

Two people later, the only shoeprints left to do were the girl Grissom was conversing with and her companion, who was still in the interview. Sara walked over and decided that in the time it would take to explain everything to Grissom's new friend, the other woman would be finished with her interview.

"Grissom, I have to..." she held up the clipboard and turned to the girl - Heather, Nick had called her. She remembered that it was polite to talk to a deaf person's face, but that had been with Dr. Gilbert, who could read lips. Nick had said this girl couldn't - so now she was completely lost as for the etiquette. She decided to try anyway.

"Heather, hi," she said, squatting down. "My name is Sara, and I'm going to need to take a look at your shoe." Heather watched over her shoulder as Grissom translated, and then replied and initiated a brief flurry of conversation. Sara reflected that it was probably the longest she'd seen him talk outside of a case explanation, and was torn between looking over her shoulder at him to ask what was taking so long to explain, and the social etiquette of keeping her face toward Heather. She didn't want to commit another gaffe like she had with Dr. Gilbert - she knew that she'd lost at least some of Grissom's respect during that case, and that respect was more precious than anything else she could count to her credit.

Finally she cleared her throat and darted a glance back. "Uhm, Griss?" she asked, quickly returning to smile reassuringly at Heather.

"Go ahead, Sara," he said, continuing to sign to Heather. She felt vaguely odd doing this while there was a heated conversation going on over her head, but reached forward and slid the sheet in front of the girl anyway, gesturing for her to stand up. "Step forward...and now lift." She repeated for the other foot quickly; Heather had caught on and was ready without the need for gestures and translated signs.

"Thank you," she said, and turned to watch Grissom make the sign for Heather, which she repeated clumsily. Sara was used to her hands doing exactly what she wanted them to, whether it was in the lab or on a crime scene. The difficulty of communicating solely through gestures was new to her.

Next was Constance Lowell, who returned from her interview at that moment and began another silent conversation over Sara's head. Blocking that out, she was able to repeat the printing without any difficulty and a minimum of communication.

She rose and turned to Grissom, who was looking at her with a studying gaze that was so typical of him. "I'm going to go talk to Green and get the blueprints. Then I'll finish up a walkthrough of the rest of the museum and see if there are any other points of disturbance."

"Take an officer with you," he urged, and she almost protested before she thought better of it. Grasping at straws, Sidle, she told herself, and watched his eyes for a long moment before relenting.

"Fine." She turned and scanned the room for Walter Green, whose official title was Museum Director. Ah - "Mr. Green. I'm Sara Sidle, and I'm with Criminalistics. Grissom talked to you about blueprints?"

"Ah, yes. Yes." He cleared his throat, a balding, slightly overweight man with shadows under his eyes. He moved to a table where there were several rolled up papers. "These are the originals - I know we're all supposed to stay here, but we need to keep these at the museum. Can I send you and Holly to the copy room?"

No evidence in the hallway; they had checked that even before entering the study. Nothing else to disturb between here and the copy room. "Sure. I'm going to go get an officer to go with us." She had made a promise of sorts, after all.


	4. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Officer Vartan was ruggedly good looking and far too comfortable with that fact for Sara's taste. She appreciated a confident man, but his insouciant smiles and unsubtle looks crossed the line into open arrogance, and that was something she didn't tolerate in regards to looks. Intellect, yes - but Vartan didn't seem to have enough of that to flaunt.

Holly set the blueprints down on the copy machine, and with an ease born of long experience, adjusted the controls to shrink the blueprint slightly. A few seconds later she handed Sara a stack of large papers, the largest size the copier would handle. Pieced together they would form blueprints of all four floors and basement archive of the Galliard Museum.

"Thanks," Sara said, and tagged the papers, tucking them with the rest of the material to be brought out to the Tahoe when the time came to leave. "Officer Vartan, I need you to come with me while I do a walkthrough of the rest of the museum."

His smile was right on the edge of leering, and she ignored it. "Sure thing," he drawled in response, and Sara breezed past him.

They had already thoroughly canvassed this corner of the first floor, and Sara moved out into the lobby. There was an unfinished mural on the wall: Las Vegas through the years. Sara didn't know enough about local history to guess what year it stopped at, but she knew it was well before present day. Most of the big casino hotels weren't yet there.

She swung the flashlight across the darkness of the open room. Welcome desk, empty brochure racks, several empty boxes - and one half-empty. Lifting a cardboard flap showed her that it was filled with assorted boxes of office supplies, obviously thrown into it at another location and probably transported to the lobby via the larger box. A search of the welcome desk's drawers showed them to be empty, and the probable eventual location of at least some of the office supplies.

"What are you looking for?" Had Officer Vartan's voice held any genuine interest, she might have forgiven him the words that took her concentration away from her search. Instead, he just sounded exasperated.

"I'll let you know when I find it," she snapped back, and continued on to the next room - a collections room. She proceeded methodically through room after room full of objects telling the story of Las Vegas's history, answering Vartan's attempts to hit on her with curt words.

Her flashlight tracked across a glass display case showing items from the Union Pacific Railroad with placards explaining that Las Vegas had first gained prominence as a railroad stop. _Learn something new every day,_ she thought wryly, and knelt down to examine a piece of white fiber caught in the edge of the glass. Instinct told her that it had nothing to do with the case, but the meticulous attention to detail necessary in a CSI made her bag it anyway.

Two rooms later, she hit paydirt. "Excellent," she murmured to herself, grinning at the smear of blood. "Hit the lights, would you?"

As soon as the area was illuminated, she began to take photos rapidly. It was only a small amount, but its position on the corner of the display case put it right in line with the emergency exit just ahead of her - given that she was now on the fourth floor, it must lead out to a fire escape of some sort. She swabbed the blood, frowning slightly when she found it was thinly spread and drier than she would have expected, and ignored Vartan's yawn of boredom, documenting the sample carefully and then moving to dust the emergency door.

Nothing. She sighed in frustration and recapped the fingerprint powder, glaring at the uncooperative door. Her cell phone rang just as she was putting the powder back in the evidence kit. "Sidle."

"Sara, we're almost finished up here. How's the walkthrough going?"

"Consider your thunder completely stolen, Nick," she said, smiling down at the blood stain. "I've got blood."

"Teacher's pet," he grumbled. "How soon do you think you'll be done?"

"Another half hour or so." She would have to dust the fire escape, and after that was one more room to look over.

"Great. Call when you're ready."

"Will do."

There were no prints on the fire escape either, though not for lack of print dust, and no more blood. She thought Vartan would cheer for joy when the last room proved equally fruitless.

"Are we done now?"

Some perverse instinct almost made her say no, but she nodded. "Yeah. We'll go back to the conference room and then you're free."

"Parting is such sweet sorrow, especially from such a beautiful little lady."

Sara barely kept her jaw closed. The _nerve_. She walked up to him and it quickly became evident, as she had known since they had started on their search of the museum, that she stood at least two inches taller than him. "Little?" she asked dangerously, looking slightly down at him for a tension-filled moment before whipping around and stalking out of the room. She didn't bother to check and see if he was following her.

~*~

"Uh oh," Nick muttered under his breath. There was Sara, looking for all the world like the first person to get in her path would cause a new crime scene, and behind her ambled the officer who had accompanied her on her walkthrough. He rubbed the back of his neck with a hand and wore the hangdog expression of deflated male ego that Nick knew from experience followed in Sara's wake when she was in this kind of a mood. He also knew from experience what it would take to set his fellow CSI off, and found that he didn't pity the officer.

"Are we ready to go?" she asked, taking the blood and fiber samples out of her vest and putting them with the rest of the evidence.

"Yeah," he answered cautiously, and hefted a box. He didn't suggest to Sara that she pick up the next one. There was no telling what her reaction would be. Thankfully, she followed his lead and helped him load the Tahoe - silently.

Nick's cell phone rang when he was halfway to the car, box in hands. "Dammit," he swore softly, and quickened his pace. "Hold on, hold on," he muttered under his breath, sliding the box into the car and whipping the phone to his ear. "Stokes."

"Hey, Nick, we just got called for a DB behind the Bellagio, suspicious circs." Warrick. Nick furrowed his brow.

"What are you calling me for?" he asked, stepping back to let Sara put another box next to his.

"Grissom's not answering his phone. Anyway, just let him know that Catherine and I won't be here when you get back."

"Any progress on the shoe prints?"

"Yeah. I've got four positive ID's. And let me tell you, there is some serious money in that museum. I matched a pair of Pradas that retail for over two-fifty."

Nick let out a low whistle and thought of Constance Galliard. All the small, second-nature observations he'd made about her returned with clarity. Tailored suit, sculptured haircut. High-end fabric and comfortable elegance. He frowned. "Men's or women's?"

"Men's. Listen, we have to get going. Tell whoever took down the shoes the other employees were wearing that I'll want to check out the list when I get back."

"That would be Sara." She looked up when he said her name and he waved her off, indicating that it was nothing serious. "Will do. See you later."

"Yeah. Bye."

"Who was that?" Sara asked. Her bad mood seemed to have mostly blown over, but Nick still watched her cautiously.

"Warrick. He and Catherine got called on a DB and Grissom's not picking up." He shrugged.

"He's probably still talking to the deaf girl," Sara observed, and there was a hint of something faraway in her voice as she watched the flickering lights of the police vehicles beyond the crime scene tape.

Nick decided her mood had recovered enough to press her about her tone. "That bother you?"

Her head snapped back and for a moment he thought he'd made a serious mistake, and then she shrugged slightly, arms tucked in close to her body. Her posture told him she wasn't going to answer, but it also told him he could assume a yes. "I'll go see if he's finished and let him know we're ready to leave."

Nick watched her leave for a few moments and then shut the back doors of the Tahoe, shaking his head.


	5. Chapter 4

_Chapter 4_

_I had morning classes, so I got here just after lunch, at two o'clock,_ Heather signed, and Grissom translated for Brass and the other officer. _I worked alone until dinner, at seven o'clock, and then I ate with Walter and Holly and Fred in the staff room. Walter and Fred had ordered in subs and Holly had a diet shake. I had PB&J._ There was a pause as Heather explained the shortened form of peanut butter and jelly she had used with an apologetic smile to Grissom.

"She noticed all that?" Brass asked, looking up from his steno pad.

_I can't hear, so I watch,_ Heather responded before Grissom had a chance to relay what Brass had said to her, _and I have a photographic memory._ She shrugged at his surprise. _I figured that's what he'd ask._

"When one sense is lost, the others become more acute," Grissom explained to Brass. "She notices a lot more than a hearing person would, and she says she has a photographic memory."

"Huh." Brass looked at the slim girl for a moment and then back to his pad. "After that?"

_I returned to the archives and about an hour later Constance arrived. She works in the archives with me sometimes. She likes the quiet, too. We worked until the officers came to get us._

"That's a lot of work without a break," Brass observed, tapping his pen against the pad.

_I'm used to it. You must know what it's like, Gil,_ she added to him. _I get caught up in the work and if I stop it breaks my concentration._

Before you realize it, hours have passed, he replied, indicating that he understood perfectly. "She was caught up in her work," he added aloud for Brass's benefit.

"Yeah," Brass grunted, and his tone said that he didn't quite buy it. "What kind of work do you do?"

_Archival work. Cataloguing, categorizing, organizing. There are thousands of pieces of ephemera in the vaults. The staff archivist left three weeks ago and they haven't been able to find a replacement yet, so I've been working extra hours. I have to go over all the documents and - well, archive them._

_Ephemera?_ Grissom asked. She had spelled the term out. _Something that doesn't last?_

_It's the archival term for anything that degrades easily, _she said. Mostly anything on paper. _Letters, photographs, maps, receipts, so on and so forth._

_Do you transcribe them?_ he asked, intrigued.

She laughed and shook her head vigorously. _No, no. Someday, maybe someone will, but right now we're still trying to determine the extent of the collection. I take notes on measurements, condition, date, and a one or two line description of the contents. Then I assign an accession number and catalogue it._

_Accession number?_ he asked. Another spelled term.

_Every object in a museum collection gets an identification number. At Galliard, we use the year, month, and day the item came to us, and then one more number to keep items entered on the same day apart. It's another way of creating a database._

"Care to share?" Brass asked, giving Grissom a pointed look. The entomologist quickly relayed the gist of Heather's words. "Did she have any contact with the victim?"

Did you see Mr. Cavrel at all tonight?

_Yes, when I got here. He was in Walter's office when I went in to let him know I was here and to see if he had any specific instructions. Sometimes they want me to concentrate on one section of the archives because they think there might be something they can use for a display. He types them out for me or he has Constance tell me._

_Constance is the only one who signs?_

_Yes. I'm teaching her,_ Heather said proudly. _And she helps me practice reading lips._

"She saw him when she arrived." _And after that? He didn't eat dinner with you?_

_No._ She paused for a moment._ He never eats dinner with the staff._

"Something of a snob?" Brass asked rhetorically. "She see anything else out of the ordinary?" Grissom translated the question and Heather shook her head firmly, something even Brass could understand. "All right, thank you for your help. We'll let you know if we have any further questions."

_Glad I could help,_ Heather signed with a smile. Grissom took her elbow and lead her back to the main room, where Constance was pacing stiffly.

"Heather!" she said, coming over in a rush, signing the words as she spoke them. "You're all right."

Heather gave her older friend an amused look. _Yes, of course I am. Gil was with me._

Constance raised an eyebrow at the last statement and gave Grissom a piercing look that he met with careful neutrality. "Thank you, Dr. Grissom."

"It's an academic title only," he informed her. "Just Grissom is fine."

"Grissom," she acknowledged coolly. "When will we be able to go home? They must be worrying about Heather back at the school."

"I think the officers have done as much as they can for tonight," he replied, as Brass came up behind him.

"We're finished here, but we may be back in contact at a later time," he confirmed.

"Thank you, Captain Brass. Grissom." Constance nodded at them both in turn and ran a hand through her hair.

Grissom froze. "Are you all right, Mrs. Lowell?"

She stared at him, visibly confused. "What?"

"That's a nasty bump you have," he observed casually. Her fingers had pushed enough of the hair away from the sides of her face to reveal a cut just at the hairline that was beginning to swell.

Her hand flew up involuntarily to touch the forming lump. "I slipped before coming to work tonight," she said, with a smile that spoke of forced carelesness. "I have a bit of a headache, but I should be fine. Now, if you will excuse us, I am going to drive Heather back to her dorm and explain to the monitors why we've kept her so late."

Heather had begun to fidget nervously when Grissom's eyes had spotted the lump, and her eyes darted from Constance to Grissom. Once, she almost raised her hands to sign, but seemed to think better of it and flattened them against her slacks. Grissom watched her out of the corner of his eye.

_Goodbye, Heather,_ he signed, and she returned the farewell in a distracted manner, her eyes on Constance. After one last moment of awkward silence, Constance and Heather left.

"You thinking what I'm thinking?" Brass asked, sticking his hands in his pockets to watch the two women leave.

"That was a fresh cut," Grissom said, "and the swelling had just started. She received it no more than an hour ago."

"Around the time of the murder," Brass commented.

~*~

"There you are!" Sara called. "I've been looking all over for you."

"Hm?" Grissom turned from where he was standing by the window. "What's wrong with this picture, Sara?"

She looked at him for a moment before craning her neck around to match his angle of view. "A fireplace in Las Vegas?" she ventured, at a loss as to what he wanted her to see.

He gave her a trademarked look of exasperation and pointed to the intricately decorated mantelpiece. Some fanciful artist with far too much time on his hands had mapped out a desert scene in different types and stains of wood. It really was beautiful, though several inches of the left hand portion of the tableau were marred by the thin mist of blood spatter.

Sara stared at the scene; hills and scrub brush, cacti and a fanciful desert hare. She swept her eyes back and forth, achieving nothing more in terms of observation than a more concrete idea of what type of wood had been used in each form. "I'm not following you, Grissom."

"_Harmonia axyridis_," he said, careful to avoid the bloody carpet as he approached the mantelpiece, still intent on whatever it was he saw in the carving.

Sara followed him gingerly, trying once again to follow his point of view to see where exactly he was looking - and then she saw it. "A ladybug," she breathed. Nestled underneath an exquisitely detailed bit of scrub tree was a small, mahogany-red ladybug. "Now that doesn't belong."

"No, it doesn't," Grissom replied in an eager voice that told her he knew every excruciating facet of the details that made it scientifically impossible for a ladybug to be in the middle of the desert. "Either the artist had no understanding of the local ecosystem, or - "

With swift movements, he switched the flashlight to his left hand and prodded the ladybug gently with his pinky finger, trying to use the smallest fingertip possible on the small piece of inlaid wood.

Somehow, Sara wasn't surprised when the ladybug slid into the wall smoothly, recessing almost an inch. At the same time, they heard a pop to their right. Sara jumped, and Grissom shined the flashlight on the piece of panelling that had separated from the wall. His grin resembled nothing so much as a kid's in a candy shop, and she felt her own lips curving upward in response.

The panelling proved surprisingly easy to swing out. "Well-oiled hinges," Sara observed, shining her flashlight on the metal. "Regularly cleaned." There wasn't a trace of the dirt that came from normal wear and tear on hinges.

"And here I was hoping for a treasure vault," Grissom joked, illuminating the small area. "I'd say it's barely large enough to fit a person."

"Well, it fit someone all right," Sara said as the beam from her flashlight picked up the glove lying on the floor of the compartment, which she then reached over to pick up. "It's still warm," she remarked, startled. Grissom reached over for it, verifying her finding.

"This was dropped recently," he finished, and they looked at each other as shared understanding came to the surface.

"He was here. He was here the whole time," she stated, unable to keep the nervousness out of her voice. "He waited for us to leave and then he snuck out."

Grissom's mind raced with a thousand denials of the possibility that the killer had been two feet away from them the entire time they'd processed the crime scene, but he kept dead ending. "The window must have been a diversion, to make us think he had fled the scene." His first instinct was to ream Brass out for not clearing the crime scene, but he knew that didn't make much logical sense, given that CSIs trained in observation had only just noticed the secret closet.

"Nick's fiber," Sara continued in his line of thought, holding the glove up so she could examine it more closely. "There's a small tear on one of the fingers. Did he catch it when he was breaking the window?"

"With his fist?" Grissom asked skeptically.

Sara shrugged. "A sudden innovation? There's not exactly a lot of clutter on the desk he could have used to break it."

"The fire tools," was Grissom's response, pointing to the stylized poker, brush, and pan set.

"People always plan meticulously up to a crime; they very rarely plan about what they're going to do after it," she quoted back at him.

"You really do remember everything I say, don't you."

She offered him a gap-toothed grin. "Yep. We'll see if the fiber matches when we get it back to the lab." She fished an evidence bag out of her vest and slipped it in while he turned back to continue searching the area inch by inch.

"Nothing more," he told her, "but I think it was well worth the effort."

"Well, they do say that ladybugs bring luck," Sara quipped.


	6. Chapter 5

_Chapter 5_

"What have you got for me, Doc?" Grissom asked, entering the autopsy bay and heading straight for the coffee machine. He sighed in bliss at the taste and looked up to see Robbins giving him a look of consternation. "What?"

The coroner shook his head and led Grissom to the body at the far end of the room. "Louis Cavrel, aged sixty-three. Death was without a doubt from the single gunshot wound inflicted at point-blank range to the head." He moved his fingers above the body's head as he spoke, articulating his words as they applied to the body. "Bullet entered here, right in the middle of the nasal cavity and exited two inches higher relative to that point on the back of the skull."

"He was shot from below," the entomologist thought out loud. "The killer was shorter than the victim?"

"Six feet three inches," Robbins supplied. "It won't be hard to find a suspect shorter than that." He shifted the white sheet. "Here's something that might interest you. Mild bruising on the left shoulder - I can't rule accidental or deliberate one way or the other. It occurred just before death, but based on what I have in front of me it could have been inflicted by bumping a door jamb just as easily as by the killer." Grissom leaned in to look at the faint bruising pattern, nodding for the coroner to keep going. "Continuing down, there's nothing much remarkable to say. A rather nasty ulcer, a missing appendix with the old scar to go with it, and some very clogged arteries. Until we get to here." He lifted the body's arm and indicated the wrist. It was circled with mottled bruising. "Peri-mortem, just barely."

"Defensive wounds?" Grissom tried to picture it. "Or offensive? Was he attacking someone who grabbed his wrist to keep him away?"

Robbins snorted and twitched the sheet back in place with the ease of long practice. "That's your domain, not mine."

~*~

"Well?"

Nick leaned back from the microscope. "Take a look for yourself." He slipped off the stool to make room for his boss.

Grissom stepped up to the instrument and peered in. "No match," he said, disappointed.

"The glove is a synthetic fabric - I've got samples down with Greg waiting to be processed, but at first guess it's a variation on some kind of turtle fur."

"Turtle fur?" Grissom asked, giving the younger man a quizzical look.

"Beloved by skiers everywhere," Nick said with a wry smile. "It's a kind of soft fabric that traps heat very efficiently. You can't go five feet in a sporting goods stores in ski areas without tripping over it." It wasn't often that he had information Grissom lacked, and he wanted to enjoy this moment.

"Huh," Grissom said, poking the inside of his cheek with his tongue. Nick tried valiantly not to make a mental comparison to a chipmunk - and failed.

"Anyway, the fiber from the window is all natural - probably linen, like you would find in a suit. A really expensive suit," he elaborated. "Judging by how thin and tightly woven the fiber bits were, the thread count was very, very high."

Grissom made a non-commital sound, rubbing a thumb over his lips as he looked at the microscope and its unhelpful fiber slide.

"I do have some good news, though," Nick reported, moving a little further down the counter to where the glove itself was lying in its evidence bag. "Sara told me when she brought the glove that she thought he might have broken the window with his fist. That was pretty thick glass. So, I took a closer look at the glove. There's GSR, which confirms the suspicion that the killer was wearing this when he shot Cavrel."

He snapped latex gloves on and slid the glove out of the bag as he talked. "And then I remembered the time my brother went to swing for me and missed and put his fist through the living room window instead. Cut his hand up pretty good, and broke two knuckles." Nick turned the fingers of the glove inside out with efficient motions, and then laid the glove out for Grissom to see.

"Blood," Grissom breathed, learning in closely and studying the inside out knuckles of the glove.

"And some rubbed off skin cells," Nick said proudly, pointing to the middle finger where the faint traces of skin could be seen. "Before you ask, I've already sent it down to Greg and he's going to run it against the blood Sara found."

"Good work, Nicky," Grissom said, grinning at the other CSI.

Nick held up a finger, indicating he wasn't done yet. "There's more." He led Grissom to another microscope. "This is the Sara's fiber - from under the desk. This time, it's a match."

"So he ripped the glove trying to open the compartment," Grissom thought aloud, "but not breaking the window. He caught his suit on the window - a sleeve, perhaps."

"He was trying to break into the compartment when Cavrel came in from a break and surprised him," Nick suggested. "What was in the compartment that was so important?"

~*~

Sara stirred the sugar into her coffee absentmindedly and stared at the computer screen, wondering how Nick had gotten the fiber evidence and she had been relegated to background research. Her attitude toward the grunt work of a case tended to vary in accordance with her mood of the night, and tonight she definitely wasn't in the mood for backtracking the newspaper society pages for news of the Galliard family.

Geoffrey Galliard, age thirty-one. Married, one son - five years old. Yale undergrad, Harvard Law. He had worked briefly in corporate law before his grandmother died, and then he had taken a position with the Galliard Foundation. But before taking that position, he had spent several months throwing lawsuits in the path of his grandmother's will, contesting the disposition of her fortune. 

Sara shook her head unbelivingly. The man had enough money in his trust fund to live in the lap of luxury for the rest of his life, and he was battling for even more millions?

Tucked away in a gossip rag, she found a report of a party dated six years ago - some quick mental calculations told Sara that the date would put it sometime in the months the oldest Galliard had spent fighting the will. She scanned the text, leaning closer to the screen as it began to get interesting. According to the author, Geoffrey Galliard had attacked the newly appointed director of the Galliard Foundation with the jagged edges of a broken wine bottle, cutting the other man's hand.

Cutting Louis Cavrel's hand.

Sara hit print and reached for her coffee, bringing the liquid to her lips as she looked at the picture of Geoffrey included with the article. He was a handsome man, no doubt about that, but there were lines about his face that spoke of a haughty arrogance, a sense of entitlement, and a look that seemed to say a silver spoon wouldn't be good enough - it would have to be gold.

And then she choked as she realized she'd put at least two too many sugar packets in her coffee. She glared down at the liquid and finally shrugged and decided to keep drinking it anyway. Now that she knew it was so heavily sugared it wouldn't take her quite so much by surprise.

Constance Lowell, twenty eight years old. Married recently. Smith College - Sara wondered briefly if any of the Galliards had stayed out west for college - with a major in comparative literature. Sara was hard pressed to find references to her before her marriage - apparently she had laid low, only emerging to attend the occasional society function, almost all of them related to either the foundation or the museum.

But then, right around her marriage, the sources about her exploded - mostly, Sara noted, due to a media infatuation with her husband.

James Lowell, aged thirty-one. Yale undergrad, Harvard business school. Sara quirked her eyebrow at the dates - the same years as Geoffrey. A little more digging told her that Geoffrey and James had been college roommates. It seemed Constance and James had become engaged in his final year of graduate school, and Sara frowned at that. That was nearly a four year engagement.

If Geoffrey Galliard had been handsome, James Lowell was, beyond a doubt, beautiful. He had black hair, piercing gray eyes, cheekbones most women would die for, and a sculpted, sensitive mouth. He and Constance made a picture-perfect couple.

_Gotta be something beneath the surface,_ Sara thought, looking at wedding pictures. She took another sip of the coffee, didn't even wince at the taste this time, and wondered fleetingly when she had become so cynical.

Lucas Galliard, age twenty-three. Considerably younger than his elder siblings - and considerably more scandalous. Sara stared in disbelief as she scrolled through article after article detailing his exploits. Lucas seemed to have no concept of restraint - a dangerous flaw in a city like Las Vegas. There were rumors of gambling debts, affairs with married women, drug use, and even a few hints of Mafia contacts. He had finished four years at Stanford by the skin of his teeth - Sara bid adieu to her east coast college theory - and probably by the deep pockets of his family.

Thomas Galliard, age sixty-two. A distinguished looking man, he appeared only as a blip on the radar compared to his more glamorous offspring. By all accounts he had set the precedent for his son's Yale-Harvard combination, emerging with an MBA, and going on to manage portions of the Galliard family business investments. He appeared only rarely in the society pages, obviously not nearly interesting enough.

Patricia Galliard, age fifty-four, was a frail, brittle-looking woman with bottle-blonde peroxide hair and just a hint too much makeup. Sara found even less information about her than she had found on Thomas, but what she found was striking. It was an old article, obviously trying for a sensationalist angle, that reported that Patrica Galliard had been admitted to a rehabilitation and mental health facility in southern California to treat chronic drug abuse and severe panic attacks. But try as she might, Sara couldn't find the story duplicated anywhere else, which gave her two equally viable possibilities: either the Galliard family had exerted some of its considerable influence to keep this information behind closed doors, or the article had been fabricated in hopes of catching the public's opinion and boosting the paper's sales. There were no further indications either way.

Thomas and Patricia were currently on a yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean. Sara snorted, remembering the last time someone connected with one of their cases had been presumed to vacationing on a yacht in the Mediterranean.

She stretched, cracking her back, and began to search on the museum and foundation employees.

"Find anything?" Grissom's voice from the doorway yanked her from her search.

"Plenty. I'll go over it with everyone later," she told him, letting him know that she hadn't finished yet.

"I thought you might want a break."

She quirked her eyebrow at the rather uncharacteristic sentiment, and tried not to read into it.

"The desk just arrived in the garage. Warrick's going to meet you there," he clarified, and moved on down the hall.

"Yes!" She was out the door in seconds.

~*~

Grissom watched from the doorway as Greg gyrated to the music blasting from his small stereo, twisting from one counter to the other and humming along to something full of gibberish and pounding drums. Grissom reflected for a moment on just what variety of sounds people would put themselves through the torture of listening to.

"Greg," he called, but the lab tech didn't hear him, leaning over a counter as he made up a slide and still moving, wagging his butt in time with the music. "Greg!"

That got his attention, and Greg looked up, startled. At Grissom's you-should-know-better look and raised eyebrow, he leaned over and flicked the stereo off. "Yes?"

"Nick said he sent the fiber and blood from the Cavrel case down to you for analysis," Grissom reminded him.

"Ah! Hither," he replied, crooking a finger and leading Grissom to a section of the desk where a series of papers were neatly laid out. "I had three fibers from your case."

"Three?" Grissom interrupted.

"Yeah," Greg answered, confused. "One black, from Nick, and one black and one white, from Sara." He picked up the first sheet and passed it to his supervisor. "First things first - the white fiber. It's pretty basic, really; just a bit of cotton. Nothing terribly exciting."

Grissom considered for a moment launching into his seminar-polished lecture about the subjective classification of evidence pertinence in a case, but decided to hold it in the interests of getting his results sooner rather than later. "Where was that found?"

"Collection envelope said somewhere in the museum," Greg said, reaching up to retrieve the object in question for more specific details. "Third floor, room 307 with exhibits on the Depression. It was caught on one of the display cases."

That clarified that. Grissom was slightly irritated that Sara hadn't run the collection by him, but shrugged it off. "Museums often use cotton gloves to handle objects in their collections. We'll have to call and ask to get a sample for comparison. Next?"

"Sara's black fiber." A second paper. "This is a little more out of the ordinary. It's pure acrylic."

"Turtle fur," Grissom remembered.

"Yeah," Greg confirmed. "Or at least, that's one of the things it could be. Acrylic is used for a lot of things. Last, but not least, you have Nick's black fiber. It gets a little more interesting with this." He handed over the last sheet of paper while he was talking. "It's a high quality mix of linen and silk. Very expensive clothes, and the fiber was pulled clean, just this one thread."

"Which means there will be clear evidence of where it was snagged on the clothes, if we can find them," Grissom continued. "And the blood?"

Greg shook his head. "Haven't finished running for full DNA scan yet. But I can tell you right now that each sample is distinct." He reached behind him for three more sheets of paper. "Victim's blood, blood from the glove, and Sara's blood." He paused for a moment. "Er, the blood that Sara found. Anyway, they're all different blood types. I also ran the samples from the three first witnesses - Green, Barristan, and Daley. No joy there, either. Well, Daley and Barristan had the same blood type as the victim, but I'm thinking that's not what you're looking for."

Grissom read through the papers, pursing his lips as he took in the more detailed serological information. "Thank you, Greg," he tossed off absentmindedly, already headed out of the lab. Behind him, Greg shrugged and turned the stereo back on as soon as the door closed behind his boss.


	7. Chapter 6

_Chapter 6_

"So, how are we going to do this?" Warrick asked as he and Sara circled the desk, raised above them.

"I was thinking a couple of crowbars," Sara replied eagerly, gesturing to the thin crack surrounding the compartment. "We could hammer it in to get enough leverage, and then pop it right off."

"I've got a better idea," the other CSI remarked from somewhere behind her. "Stand clear."

Sara jumped backward as the desk began to lower. "What are you doing?"

"Cavrel didn't use a crowbar every time he wanted to open his desk," Warrick told her, and the desk stopped its descent. "There's probably a catch or something."

"Spoil all my fun," Sara grumbled. "Fine, but if we can't open it in the next ten minutes, we try it my way. Deal?"

Warrick shook his head, amused. "Deal. And I've got fifty that says I open it before you."

"Wouldn't want to take your money, War," she snarked back.

Nine minutes and twenty three seconds later, Sara was painstakingly searching the void from the left hand drawers with a flashlight, looking for any sign of a button or lever that would pop the compartment open.

"Got it," Warrick called.

"What?" Sara asked, and yanked her hand out from the guts of the desk so fast she bumped her wrist. "Ow," she hissed, holding the raw skin with her other hand as she circled around to the front of the desk, where Warrick was kneeling. "On the front?"

"Doesn't seem very convenient, does it?" was the rhetorical question as Warrick pressed the small section of molding. They both heard the click, and Sara went back to the front of the desk and ducked under to see if the compartment had opened.

"Nope," she told him. "It's still closed."

"Damn," Warrick said, rocking back on his heels. "Wait - try pushing it in. This could have unlocked it."

"All right, but if this doesn't work, we go for the crowbars. We passed ten minutes," she warned as she sat on one of the rollers they used for going under cars and slid into the knee hole. Bracing herself against the shifting surface of the small cart, she pressed upward cautiously.

With a double click the compartment thudded open, narrowly missing Sara's head as she ducked just in time, and hung suspended about five inches below the desk. "That did it."

"I could have been fifty dollars richer right now," Warrick sighed regretfully from somewhere around her feet.

"It didn't open until after the ten minutes was up," she pointed out. "_I_ could have been fifty dollars richer right now. Pull me out."

"Semantics," was his remark as he grabbed her ankles and tugged. The cart's momentum kept her going several more feet, and she yelled in surprise. "Whoops, sorry."

Sara stood up, dusting off her black pants, and glared at him as she made her way back to the desk. "I bet you are. What was in it?"

Warrick was in the process of emptying the manila folders. The first contained a series of bank statements, and he began shifting through them. "Whoa...these aren't his." She leaned in over his shoulder and scanned the names on the tops as he read them out loud. "Geoffrey Galliard, Lucas Galliard, Carter Treadwell, Robert MacMahon - Senator Robert MacMahon?" His voice was filled with disbelief. "It goes on from there. He's got half of Las Vegas in here. The rich half, anyway."

Sara opened her mouth to say something about the relative percentage of Las Vegas citizens who were classified above the wealthy line, but thought better of it. "What about the other envelopes?"

He replaced the bank statements in the first envelope and opened the second, shaking its contents out onto the desktop. "Well, well, well."

"What, was he running his own soft-porn business?" she observed, flipping through picture after picture of people in any variety of sexual positions. "Wait - that's Geoffrey Galliard."

"Let me guess - that's not his wife."

Sara shook her head, and squinted at the picture. "She does look familiar, though."

Warrick took the picture from her and looked at it more closely. "That's Tea Cahill."

"Who?"

"You've probably seen her on billboards along the Strip. She headlines a show at the Bellagio," Warrick informed her.

"Galliard has a history of violent behavior toward Louis Cavrel," Sara said, going back to the pile and looking for more pictures of him. "Here's another one - I think that's Cahill again." She tilted her head to the side. "Yeah, that's her."

"Inventive," Warrick commented.

"Hmm, yeah," Sara said, flipping to the next photo. "It's just these two photos. Wait - check the bank statements again."

"Blackmail," he said grimly, and took out the bank statements again, searching for Geoffrey Galliard's. "Here it is - no regular withdrawals. Some pretty hefty credit card purchases, though. Guy must let his wife have a little too much leeway with his plastic."

"Why are you assuming it's his wife?" Sara challenged.

"Because if Galliard is buying almost a thousand dollar's worth of lingerie at a designer store, then that's a whole 'nother kind of blackmail."

"Oh." She paused for a moment. "So he hadn't started yet?"

"Calls him there that night to show him the pictures and start tapping him for money. The bank statements are so he knows exactly how much he can bleed the guy for," Warrick ventured.

"Then why the fiber caught on the desk? Why the splintered wood?" Sara gestured back toward the desk.

"He got there before Cavrel. He tried to find the photos, was trying to open the compartment when Cavrel interrupted him."

"But not before he burned something. Or Cavrel burned something before Galliard ever arrived. Or he burned it in front of him." Sara glared at the photos, frustrated. "Something doesn't add up. 

"We don't have all the pieces," Warrick reminded her, and as if agreeing with his words, both of their pagers went off simultaneously.

"Grissom," she said unnecessarily. "Layout room."

"All right. Let's get this pulled together."

~*~

"It was set up to look like a simple hold up, but the amount of stabbing wounds says crime of passion," Catherine was telling Grissom when Nick entered the room. "Brass pulled the hotel bills, and it looks like he wasn't staying alone, despite what his wife told us."

"Which you are not going to tell her," Grissom instructed her, his voice hard for a moment. She looked at him, angry, and then seemingly relented. "Catherine. I mean it."

"Fine."

Warrick and Sara entered a few minutes after Nick, each carrying a manila envelope. Grissom quirked an eyebrow at them. "I see you were able to open the desk."

"Without crowbars, even," Warrick said, and ignored the dirty look Sara tossed in his direction. "Found some pretty interesting things, too."

"All right. Sara, you were doing background, why don't you start?"

"Louis Cavrel, sixty-three years old. Divorced, no children, wife lives in LA. He was appointed as Director of the Galliard Foundation by the late Rose Galliard, and assumed the office officially upon her death six years ago." Sara passed around the picture of Cavrel pre-gunshot wound to the face.

"First witness, first suspect: Walter Green, fifty-two years old. Never married, lives by himself, appointed as Director of the Galliard Musem by Louis Cavrel four years ago after a ten year tenure at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Tom Daley, thirty years old, married with two children. Director of Collections, appointed by Green three years ago, came from a position as Director of Programming at the Mormon museum here in Las Vegas. Holly Barristan, twenty-seven years old, administrative assistant for all of the senior museum staff. Hired by the Galliard Foundation right out of college. Those are the only three people, as far as we know, who were in the area at the time of the murder."

"But we have reason to believe that the killer may not have been any of the people in the museum that we interviewed that night," Grissom explained. "Sara and I found a hidden closet and the glove that Nick analyzed, suggesting that it had been dropped recently. He may well have been in there the entire time we were processing the scene."

Nick suppressed a shiver and saw nearly everyone else at the table doing the same. Though their jobs weren't inherently dangerous, they were all possessed of a certain physical bravery. But still, the idea that the killer had been not five feet from them the entire time they were processing the crime scene was unsettling.

"At any rate, each of them gave their blood samples freely, and initial blood typing does not match the blood found on the glove, which was linked conclusively to the murder from the powder burn in evidence."

Grissom's pager beeped, and he unclipped it from his belt. "The gun found at the scene is a match to the bullet that Catherine pulled out of the wall, and is registered to Louis Cavrel. No prints at all," he relayed to the group, and then pushed a series of photos out onto the table after putting his pager back. "Cavrel died instantly from the gunshot wound to the head, entering here and exiting here," he said, pointing on the photos. "He had a series of bruises on his shoulder and on his wrist that may have been defensive wounds."

"That makes sense with the blood spatter," Catherine added. "Your basic high velocity pattern: thin, misted spray. Along with the autopsy evidence and the bullet found in the wall it points toward an upward angle of shot - our killer was either shorter than Cavrel or bent over. Diameter says he was shot three to four feet from the wall, exactly where he fell."

Nick was next, and summarized what he'd learned from the glove and the fibers Greg had processed. "So basically, if we find either the suit or can get a DNA sample, we'll have a smoking gun, but the evidence doesn't point us toward anything beyond that."

"Our evidence does," Warrick said triumphantly, sliding the photos and bank statements in the center of the table. Catherine let out a low whistle and Nick felt a flush creep up his cheeks. "Geoffrey Galliard and Tea Cahill. And these are Geoffrey Galliard's bank statements. These envelopes are full of dirt on some of Las Vegas's biggest names. We're thinking blackmail."

"I'll say," Catherine snorted.

"Geoffrey Galliard has a law degree from Havard and used that education to spend the better part of a year contesting his grandmother's will - specifically, contesting the establishment of the Galliard Foundation. Six years ago, during the legal battle, he attacked Louis Cavrel at a party with a broken wine bottle. He cut him up pretty badly, but no charges were filed," Sara supplied.

"Did you know him?" Grissom asked, fixing her with a curious gaze.

Sara shook her head. "He graduated before I got there even as an undergrad, and besides, the law students didn't mix with anyone but themselves."

"Here's how we think it went down," Warrick continued. "Cavrel tells Galliard he's got these pictures, and has him come to the museum. Galliard gets there early, and decides to find the pictures before him. He looks through the desk, probably finds Cavrel's gun, but he can't find anything until he sees the compartment underneath. He tries to get it open, but he's interrupted - that's probably when he snags his glove. Galliard opens fire at point blank range, breaks the window to make us think he's gone, and hides in the secret closet before anyone can get there. He stays in the closet until he can sneak out, and then leaves - forgetting his glove behind."

"Would he have had time to get in the closet?" Catherine wanted to know.

Grissom tapped his fingers against his lips. "Green's statement said he stopped to grab an umbrella before he went down to investigate."

"Gloves mean premeditation," Nick mused. "It was cool outside, but not so much that he would have needed gloves."

"That should be enough to get a warrant for Galliard's house, and for a blood sample," Warrick pointed out. 

Grissom nodded, but was still lost in thought. "There are still unanswered questions."

"The paper in the fireplace," Sara said, "and the blood I found in the museum."

"And the white fiber Sara found," Nick reminded them. "I'm going back to the museum after this to see what kind of gloves they use for cleaning. We might be able to eliminate that from evidence."

"Catherine, Warrick, I want you to stay on the DB at the Bellagio; Catherine, you're lead. I'll take lead on this investigation; Sara and Nick, you're with me. I'm going to go have Brass get us a warrant for Geoffrey Galliard." Grissom rose, the meeting obviously at an end.

Nick looked at his watch and shook his head ruefully. "Another double," he muttered under his breath.

Sara gave him a cheerful grin when she heard the words, and he rolled his eyes behind her back as he followed her out of the room.


	8. Chapter 7

_Chapter 7_

Sara squinted at the sunrise, bright even behind her sunglasses, and thought longingly about a cup of decent coffee. The overly sugared department sludge she had consumed while researching had left a musty taste in her mouth, and she didn't have anything but gum to refresh it with. And she would never chew gum anywhere near a crime scene. 

And dammit, she wanted a cigarette.

She sighed heavily in frustration, and across the granite expanse that served as front steps up to the Galliard house, Grissom looked at her quizzically. She shook her head, indicating that it was nothing, and he turned back to watching Brass ring the doorbell once again.

"Hello?" The young woman at the door had obviously just woken up, and rubbed her eyes blearily. "Can I help you?"

"We're from the Las Vegas Police Department," Brass said, flashing his badge. "May we come in?"

"I don't understand," the woman said, instantly awake and suspicious. "What's going on?"

_Same song and dance every time_, Sara thought, and recognized the man coming up to the doorway.

"Clara? What is this?" Geoffrey Galliard was an imposing figure, even in his bathrobe, and this close his blue eyes and square jaw were striking, as was the lightly swelling bruise on his right cheekbone.

"They say they're with the police," Clara told him, obviously still confused by the entire situation.

Galliard looked at them with a steady gaze and then nodded slightly. "Come in, please. Clara, would you bring us some coffee?"

Clara nodded, obviously happy to have an order she understood, and left the doorway, presumably in the direction of the kitchen as Galliard opened the door to let them in.

"You don't have to offer us anything, Mr. Galliard," Grissom told him as they followed Galliard to a living room. Sara eyed a couch that was worth six months of her rent and snorted softly.

"I insist." He gestured for them to have a seat and they followed his lead, Brass perching gingerly on the edge of the cushion as if he knew just how much it was worth and didn't want it coming out of his salary later. Sara noticed with a start that both of his hands were lightly bandaged across the knuckles, and a warning ticked in her head. "But please, tell me why you are here? I hope it doesn't have anything to do with Luke."

The youngest brother, the one with the wild reputation, Sara remembered, and found it interesting that Galliard's first thought was that they would be here because of his brother.

"No. There's been a murder at the Galliard Museum. Louis Cavrel was shot last night."

He didn't so much as twitch a facial muscle, much less blink, as Sara watched him intently for the aftermath of Brass's words.

"I'm sorry to hear that," was his only comment, the words rolling smoothly off his tongue. 

"You don't sound sorry," Brass pushed quickly.

"Louis and I didn't get along very well," he conceded idly, and Clara brought in a tray of coffee in tiny cups, European style, with a side plate of biscotti and a silver containers of cream and sugar. He reached forward and picked up a cup carefully, waving with his other hand toward the other cups. "Please, help yourselves."

Sara didn't waste any time and curled her fingers around the hot porcelain, the scent alone banishing all memories of department coffee. Brass picked up a cup as well, balancing it awkwardly in his thick fingers, while Grissom abstained, watching Galliard intently.

"I'd say not getting along very well is an understatement, Mr. Galliard," he observed quietly. "You attacked him six years ago."

In less than a second, Galliard's entire demeanour changed. Outwardly, he sipped coffee lazily, but his eyes sharpened and fixed on Grissom, and there was a tension in his frame that Sara couldn't describe with any other word but dangerous. "Am I to understand that you think I had something to do with this, Mr...?"

"Grissom," the entomologist filled in. "I'm a forensic scientist. I'm only following the evidence, Mr. Galliard. What I think has nothing to do with this."

Sara had the distinct impression that Galliard was suddenly amused. "Ah, yes, I've heard about you, Mr. Grissom. I remember you, in fact. I was at that unfortunate charity fundraiser several weeks back - the poor young woman. And poor Portia. She was very close to my grandmother. Quite the tragic story."

"You're changing the subject, Mr. Galliard," Brass said pointedly, setting his empty coffee cup down.

"Six years ago," Galliard said, in tones of dismissal. "Emotions were running high for everyone that night, and I admit freely that I had had a bit too much to drink. Louis understood, and chose not to press charges. We have maintained a cordial working relationship since, as I'm sure anyone you ask will be able to tell you."

"So cordial that he was planning on blackmailing you?" Sara interrupted, setting her own coffee cup next to Brass's. "We found the pictures in Cavrel's desk."

She had to give him credit - he looked genuinely surprised. "Blackmail?"

Sara tossed the photos on the table where they lay next to the silver coffee tray in a distinctly awkward juxtaposition. The first crack in Galliard's composure showed as he drew in a shuddering breath and picked up one of the pictures. "You found these in Louis's desk?"

"Along with copies of your bank statements going back several months," Grissom informed him. "May I ask, Mr. Galliard, how you injured yourself?"

"My hands, and my cheek?" Galliard tore his eyes away from the pictures to look at the criminalist with surprise. "I box with my brother-in-law several times a month. We had a match last night."

"Bare knuckles?" Brass asked skeptically.

"It was Jamie's preference," Galliard responded coolly, and Sara could tell that his composure had fully returned.

"And what time was that?" Brass riposted easily.

"I'm going to have to ask you to leave now," Galliard said firmly, replacing his coffee cup on the tray and standing.

Brass smiled beatifically and fished the warrant out of his inside suit pocket. "Not just yet, you're not."

~*~

Nick flashed his badge at the officer standing in front of the entrance to the staff offices and was waved on. He had already talked to Tom Daley and bagged one of the gloves used in the museum, and had decided to take another look around the crime scene while he was here.

"Mrs. Lowell," he said, startled to see her standing at the doorway of Cavrel's office.

"I'm not in the crime scene," Constance shot back, immediately defensive.

He held up his hands in a nonthreatening gesture. "Hey, I didn't say anything. I was just surprised to see you here."

She shrugged, and he noticed she was wearing the same suit he had last seen her in, something at odds with her carefully presented appearance of the night before. "My apologies, then. And please call me Constance."

"Nick," he said, setting the evidence kit down and holding out his hand. "And now we're off to a much better start than we were last night."

She smiled warmly at him as she shook his hand, and it changed her entire face from beautiful to radiant. For a moment he forgot to breathe, and then remembered where he was. "Out of curiosity, though..."

"What am I doing here?" she filled in for him. "I couldn't sleep, so I came in to work. I can't believe he's dead. All that blood..." Her voice trailed off, and she flushed. "I can't say I'm sorry, though," she added, half to herself, and then seemed to realize who she was talking to. "I probably shouldn't have said that."

"Probably not," Nick agreed cautiously.

She turned back to look in at the office. "I don't have any secrets, Nick. Louis Cavrel was not an especially pleasant person, as I'm sure any number of other people at the museum have told you. He was a good politician, and a good director, but he never won with honey what he could win with steel. And there were all the rumors..." She trailed off again, and seemed to shake herself. "You don't want to hear gossip."

"If it helps the case, I do," he told her honestly.

"It was years ago," she said. "It wouldn't have anything to do with this." At his questioning look, she added more firmly, "I'm sure of it."

"If you change your mind, here's my card," he said, fishing an LVPD Criminalistics business card out of his back pocket.

"I'll let you know," she promised. "I should get back to the archives, now." With one last smile, she left him standing at the doorway. 

He watched her leave for a moment and then shook his head, chiding himself for acting like a hormonal teenager. "Way out of your league, Stokes," he told himself, ducking under the yellow tape and walking a full three feet into the office before he realized he'd left his evidence kit in the hallway.

~*~

Galliard leaned against the doorjamb, arms crossed and a decidedly hostile look on his face as he watched Grissom checking the suits in the walk-in closet. He'd dressed in slacks and a polo shirt, and looked ready for a day at the country club rather than a day watching investigators search his house.

"Papa?" Sara started from her notations of shoe types to see a beautiful young boy standing at the doorway of the master suite, seemingly yards away from where they were in the closet. Galliard left them immediately and went to his son, hefting him up onto his hip.

"Sshhh," he said calmingly, "why don't we get you back to bed?" Sara was entranced for a moment, and he caught her looking at him.

"He's beautiful," she offered, in all sincerity. Patrick Galliard had inherited his father's wavy blond hair and striking eyes, though his form was slimmer than his father's sturdy build.

"He's his mother," was Galliard's simple response. "If you'll excuse me," he added coolly, and Sara turned back to the shoes, trying to reconcile the father and besotted husband she had just seen with the man from the blackmail photos and the cold calculation that had led someone to shoot Louis Cavrel in the face at point blank range.

_No,_ she told herself firmly, _you're letting a suspect cloud your judgement._ She could hear Grissom's voice in her ear, so clearly that she repressed the urge to turn and see if he had actually spoken. _Concentrate on what does not lie: the evidence._

And right now the evidence was telling her that she held in her hands a pair of men's size fourteen Pradas, a perfect match to one of the shoe prints Warrick had lifted from Cavrel's office. She reached behind her for a paper evidence bag and tucked the shoes inside. "These shoes were on Warrick's list," she told Grissom, who was examining the left sleeve of one of the suit jackets.

"That only proves that he wore those shoes in Cavrel's office at some point," he said, frustrated. "I've gone over all these suits twice, and none of them have any tears or gunshot residue."

"He could have tossed it," Brass said from where he was looking out the window. "They must have at least an acre of irrigated backyard," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. "Man, they could pay my whole salary with what they sink into that lawn." He started in with more observations about the grandeur and expense of the bathroom, but this time his voice trailed off mid-sentence.

"Jim?" Grissom stuck his head out of the closet.

"Check this out," Brass called, and Sara stood up to follow Grissoom over to where the homicide detective pointed to a framed picture. Sara recognized all the members of the immediate Galliard family except for Lucas - wearing skis and waving from a snowy slope in front of a huge timber frame house.

"He's wearing black gloves," she observed excitedly.

"Is there something further I can help you with?" Galliard asked from the doorway. "You won't find anything. I didn't kill Louis. I don't even own a gun."

"Do you ski often, Mr. Galliard?" Grissom asked, turning from the picture.

"We have a family house in Colorado. We often spend weekends there. It's where Pamela is right now," he answered. "That picture was taken two years ago."

"May we see your ski equipment?" Brass asked in a tone that didn't really pose a question.

"This is getting absurd," Galliard retorted angrily. "If you really think it will help, I'll show it to you."

They followed him down to the basement, where skis, boots, and thick winter clothes were carefully stored in a stand-up chest in a room full of athletic toys. Sara eyed the spare boxing ring at the other end and the cedar door that no doubt led to a sauna.

Within seconds, a search of the closet turned up one left glove with no dance partner, and Grissom passed it to Sara to bag. "Do you happen to know when the other glove went missing, Mr. Galliard?"

"What?" Galliard stepped forward. "Pamela might have taken it by accident, or it could have gotten lost on the last trip. I don't do a regular inventory of my ski equipment."

Sara looked into the closet again. Boots were all aligned the same way and lined up smallest to largest, skis were leaned and equally spaced, and scarfs and hats were folded along the top shelf. "Someone keeps this pretty well organized."

"You're coming very close to the boundaries of your warrant," Galliard warned suddenly. "If there's nothing else you need here, please leave my home."

Brass spread his hands apart in an accomodating gesture, an expression on his face that was two degrees away from a smirk. "I think we've found plenty. Grissom, Sara, you finished?"

Sara nodded, but Grissom was still scanning the room, lips pursed. "Who else would have access to this closet, Mr. Galliard?"

"No one who would have killed Louis," he snapped.

"You have a law degree from Harvard. I don't think I have to explain to you what obstructing justice means." Brass seemed to take particular delight in delivering the ultimatum.

"Anyone in my family. Pamela has been at our house in Colorado since last Friday. And I hope you're not going to suggest that Patrick killed Louis." His words were clearly joking, but there was an undercurrent in his voice that left no doubt in their minds that his paternal instincts would not let them anywhere near his son.

"Your siblings? Your parents? Friends, housekeeping staff?" Grissom prompted.

"My sister Constance and her husband. My brother Luke. My parents have been in Europe for two months now." He stopped suddenly, seeming to realize something. "My God, Connie. She would have been at the museum last night. Is she all right?" He didn't seem to harbor the slightest suspicion that his sister would have committed murder.

"She's fine," Sara told him, and he relaxed slightly.

"Any of the cleaning staff as well. I'll - " He stopped, the words obviously bitter in his mouth. "I'll get you a list of names."

Grissom stood placidly, taking the information in, his eyes still circling the room in the obsessively observational fashion so typical of him. "We're done here. Sara, please take a DNA sample from Mr. Galliard, and we'll be out of his way."


	9. Chapter 8

_Chapter 8_

Nick leaned up against the doorjamb of Grissom's office, inching slowly forward - 

The fish over the door broke into raucous noise, and Nick sighed in defeat.

"Speed doesn't fool the motion detector, Nick," Grissom said without looking up. 

"Worth a try," he said with a shrug, and sat down in the chair in front of the desk. Grissom finished scanning the sheet, signed the bottom, and dropped into a nearly-empty "Out" box.

"Paperwork doesn't stop even for celebrity murders," he grumbled. "What do you have?"

"The white fiber matches the gloves used to handle objects in the collections, and the room Sara found it in had been cleaned that morning according to their records. Daley seemed pretty sure it would have been left then. Actually, he looked like he was going to go chew someone's head off for leaving it there," Nick added, amused. "It's looking like a dead end."

Grissom leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers together. "And the glove we found at Galliard's?"

"Perfect match to the one found at the crime scene," Nick said with a grin. "And it gets better. I went back to re-examine the suit Cavrel was wearing that night, figuring that if he had defensive wounds on his shoulder and his wrist, his murderer must have been holding on pretty tightly. I lifted fibers from around the wrist - it was a black suit, and they blended right in, but put them under a microscope and they're a perfect visual match to the fibers from under the desk and the gloves. I'm waiting on Greg to confirm it's acrylic, but..." He held his hands up. As far as the CSIs were concerned, a visual match could direct an investigation; it was only court that would need the documentation that the fibers were of the same type.

"Good job, Nick," Grissom praised, and looked down when his pager went off. "Speaking of Greg, it looks like he's finished with the blood samples. Shall we?"

~*~

"I've got good news and bad news," Greg said, holding the papers close to his chest. "Which first?"

Sara said "bad" at the same time Nick said "good," and they both chuckled ruefully and looked to Grissom for a tie-breaker. He only glared at the lab tech.

"Fine," Greg said with a long-suffering sigh. "We'll go with the bad news first," he started, with a wink at Sara. "Further DNA typing confirms that the blood in the glove and the blood on the display case are not the same. And..." he paused, going for effect, "...the blood in the glove is not a match to the sample you took from Galliard."

Sara's shoulders slumped visibly in frustration. "So what was the good news?"

"Ah - this is where it gets interesting." He moved to a second sheet. "When I tested Galliard's sample against your sample, Sara, that was on the display case, I didn't get a match either - not a full match."

"Not a full match?" Grissom prompted.

"They have DNA in common, but not all of it." He held the sheet out for all three of them to examine. "First-degree relatives."

"Constance Lowell had a cut on her head," Grissom breathed, remembering. "But she said she'd fallen before coming in to work."

"She was lying," Sara said, a hint of anger in her voice. "The blood on the case was fresh. I remember thinking it was odd because it was drier than I would have expected to place it around the time of the murder - but it was definitely fresh enough to have been left there that night."

"Heather didn't say anything about Constance leaving during the time they were working..." Grissom said. "Something's not right here."

Nick said nothing, but looked distinctly ill. He was saved from Sara's queries when his pager went off, and he nodded when he read the message. "Hey, uh, Griss? It's past eleven am, and it looks like the evidence analysis is winding down..." He didn't ask directly, and evaded Grissom's slightly annoyed gaze.

"Got a hot date, Nick?" Sara teased, ignoring Grissom's chastising look.

"Yeah, with my bed," he quipped back, but his voice was strained. "I'm beat."

Grissom just watched him for a long moment, and then nodded slowly. "Get some sleep. We'll see you tonight." There wasn't really any question in his mind about whether or not Sara would stay through to their next shift.

"Thanks." Nick beat a hasty retreat as Sara and Grissom stared at his back.

"What was that all about?" Sara asked, still staring at the door Nick had exited by.

Grissom merely raised an eyebrow at her, reminding her that it was none of her business. "Has QD finished with the paper you pulled out of the fireplace yet?" he asked pointedly.

Sara blinked and shook her head. "No, they've been backed up...yeah, I know, I'm on it."

~*~

"It's old."

"I could have told you that, Ronnie," Sara snapped at the lab tech. Dealing with the QD tech never failed to put her in a bad mood. "Do you have anything more?"

"It's paper." He held up his hands to forestall her angry retort. "That's not as obvious as you'd initially think. There are Latin words on it, and writing in Latin went out of style somewhere around the late fifteenth century. It would have been perfectly legitimate to question the material. Could've been parchment, or papyrus, or any number of other things."

"But this is definitely paper." Sara nodded, understanding his method.

"Yes. But not old enough to be of the time period we'd normally associate with Latin." He shoved his rolling chair over to where the three pieces of paper were carefully suspended between glass for study. "In fact, it was commercially produced, which says to me we're looking at something written within the past twenty-five years. The ink also contains synthetic substances - in particular, one that didn't have widespread use until ten years ago. It's a chemical specifically designed to prevent degradation. Now, it's included in a lot of the markers you can buy at a crafts store to write in scrapbooks. Speaking of that, your paper is acid-free, too, another tactic to prevent it from aging. Of course," he concluded, shrugging, "the fire pretty much made all that null and void."

"It's no older than ten years?" Sara asked, startled. "It was so dry..."

"Paper dries out quickly," Ronnie pointed out. "Even more so if you keep it in a temperature and humidity controlled environment. Your biggest problem with conservation of documents, historical or otherwise, and after fire, of course," he added, tongue firmly in cheek, "is moisture. Followed closely by insects. So the first thing you do when you want to keep paper around for a while is to is keep it at a constant, relatively low humidity. You found this at a museum, didn't you?"

"With its own archive vault in the basement," Sara said, realization dawning.

Ronnie nodded. "That would do it. This paper has been very carefully conserved. As for the Latin," he continued, "I can't help you with that. I can tell you that the calligraphy is of a recent style, and done with a pen as opposed to a brush or a quill or anything like that, and I could probably match the pen if you found anything, but right now all I can tell you is that it could be anything from a teach-yourself-calligraphy kit to a gold-inlaid Waterman."

"Knowing these people, probably the latter," Sara said. "Do you have some paper and a pen?"

"That's not funny," Ronnie said peevishly, and Sara felt the return of her usual combative relationship with the tech.

"I want to copy the Latin down and bring it to Grissom to see if there's any more he can tell us about it. I can translate it, but we should be able to tell more by its construction," she informed him testily. "Can I borrow something to write with?"

"Yeah, fine," he returned, ripping a page out of a steno notebook and handing it to her.

_Totas meas_, Sara transcribed, frowning at the paper. "Is that a d?"

Ronnie leaned in. "Yes. It's leading into something, too. Judging by the angle...it's not one of your round letters. Lower-case calligraphy a, d, o, letters like that, will have a higher angle of departure because the writer needs to go higher, faster. This is more of a b, i, or j kind of letter - straight up without the need to close a loop first."

Sara noted the possibilities and then looked in vain at the other two pieces of paper behind the glass. One was completely empty, and one contained part of a capital letter, but it had been so badly charred there was nothing to decipher besides the abnormally tall first upward sweep. She shook her head in frustration and tucked the paper with the Latin onto it into her pocket, handing the pen back to Ronnie. "Thanks."

He grunted in answer and slid his chair back to the bench where he had been working when she'd come in. She rolled her eyes and left the lab.


	10. Chapter 9

_Chapter 9_

Grissom was leaned back in his chair, tapping his pen against his lips and reading something out of a brown LVPD folder when Sara knocked on the open door of his office, signalling her presence. "I've got the QD results."

He waved her to a seat and sat up straight. "I just double-checked both Constance Lowell and Heather Marks's statements. Neither of them mentioned that Constance left the archives after she entered." He shook his head. "She didn't fall into that display case and cut her head." He placed the photos Sara had taken of the blood smear on the desk. The glass was still intact, with no abnormalities but the blood. "She was already bleeding when she hit it - if she'd fallen or been pushed into it, the force should have been enough to at least crack the glass."

Sara felt a slow burn begin in her stomach as she looked at the picture. "Someone hit her."

"It looks likely," Grissom said cautiously, watching Sara's reaction. "The question is, who?"

"Cavrel," Sara suggested. "Motive." Her tone suggested she wouldn't have blamed Constance in the slightest.

"The gloves," Grissom countered. "And the fiber on the window. She was wearing a blue suit that night. The fiber was black. And Cavrel's defensive wounds - could she have inflicted those? We're still not seeing the whole picture."

"All right," Sara agreed, but she couldn't stop staring at the photo on the desk. She started when Grissom took it out of her line of sight.

"QD?" he asked gently, and Sara shivered slightly, blinked to clear her mind of the image of the blood, and passed him the sheet of steno paper.

She summarized what Ronnie had said about the paper and the ink. "The last time I took Latin was junior year in high school. I can tell what that says, but beyond that the only thing I can tell you is that I should be able to tell something about what came before and after it by the form of those words. I just can't tell what the form is."

Grissom studied the paper. "A Latin sentence is like a puzzle. Every word has a shape, a form determined by its case, gender, and number, and that shape determines what the other shapes in the sentence will be," he began, in a voice that Sara remembered from a long-ago seminar. She smiled in remembrance and leaned forward to watch him work.

"First things first. _Totas_, from _totus_, an adjective meaning 'all' or 'everything.' _Meas_, from _meus_, a possessive adjective in the first person singular - 'my.' Adjectives always agree in gender, number, and case with the noun that they're describing. Both _totas_ and _meas_ are in the accusative case, feminine gender, and plural. Therefore, they're describing something in the accusative, feminine, and plural. The accusative case means it's the object of a verb. Think, 'I process evidence.' _Laboro evidentiam_. 'Evidence' is the direct object of 'process' and so _evidentiam_ is the accusative form of _evidentia_. Whatever _totas meas_ is describing is the object of the verb. It could be something like 'I wash all my lab instruments before putting them away.'" Grissom was obviously completely engrossed as he thought aloud, and Sara grinned at the picture he made of a dedicated scientist.

"In classical Latin, the noun these words are describing could be almost anywhere in the sentence, within reason. It could come before the adjectives just as easily as afterward - what serves to link them is the case." He paused, tapping his finger against his lip. "But you said this couldn't have been written more than ten years ago, and if we assume the author is working from an English language base, then he's not going to have the logic of a native Latin speaker, and he'll follow the accepted order of words in the English language - and in English, possessive adjectives are directly followed by the noun they describe."

"Well, it's something plural and feminine that starts with a d and then has a not-round letter after it. That's either - i, u, or maybe y depending on the calligraphy," Sara said, concentrating on how she would draw the letters when writing in cursive.

Grissom leaned back and snagged a huge book of his shelf, tossing it on the desk in front of Sara with a thud. "Here you go."

"What?" She stared at the Latin dictionary in disbelief. "Griss, you're the one who actually speaks the language, I really don't know if I'm the right person for the job - "

"Technically, Sara, no one speaks Latin anymore. That's why it's a dead language. And Dr. Gilbert is bringing Heather Marks by for more questioning in - " he checked his watch, " - seven minutes." He stood, making it clear that he didn't expect any argument.

Sara stared in disbelief at the dictionary in front of her - it had to be well over a thousand pages. She sighed and hefted it in her right arm, grabbing the sheet with the words on it in her other hand, and left Grissom's office.

~*~

"I got your page," Nick said cautiously, sliding into the booth. "I really don't think this is a good idea."

"You said if I had anything more to say, to contact you," Constance pointed out.

"I know." He ran a hand through his hair, slightly frustrated. "Look, Mrs. Lowell, I - "

"Constance," she reminded him.

"Constance," he relented. "I'm investigating a crime that you..." He caught himself just in time. "That's close to you. Conflict of interest is only one of the phrases the lawyers could throw around."

"Am I a suspect?" she asked pointedly, staring at her coffee as she stirred it.

Nick opened and closed his mouth, and was saved by the waitress at his elbow. "Can I get you anything, sir?"

Normally he would have responded to her openly flirtatious smile and short skirt, but he only glanced at her distractedly. "Coffee, I guess."

"We have over twenty-five varieties of coffee here," the waitress told him, in a way that suggested he really should have known that before he came in.

"Whatever she's having," he said brusquely, pointing to the cup Constance was concentrating on.

"Right away," the waitress said, and flounced off, seemingly irritated that he hadn't noticed her at all.

"Well, am I?" Constance asked again, looking him in the eyes this time.

"At this stage of the investigation, everyone is a suspect," he finally decided to say, thinking it sounded like something Grissom would say.

"Especially my brother," she said, and he saw a spark of anger in her blue eyes.

Oh, boy. "You have two brothers, Constance, and like I said everyone is a suspect..." It was a weak evasion, and they both knew it.

"Your friends went through his house," she said, and her hand around the mug tightened so he could see the whites of her knuckles. "Geoffrey would never kill anyone."

"My _colleagues_ are following the evidence," he fired back, now annoyed, and then sighed, fixing his gaze on the businessmen sharing cappuccinos in the booth behind Constance, and then looking at the woman in front of him again. "I'm sorry," he said softly, as hollow as he knew the words must sound, and reached forward to lay his hand on her forearm and try to calm her down.

She hissed suddenly and jerked her arm away from his hand, slopping coffee onto the table. "Dammit," she snarled, the coarse word at odds with her careful appearance, and he offered her napkins from the dispenser at the end of the table, concerned.

"Did you hurt your arm?" he asked, watching her soak up the coffee with the napkins, a slight frown on his face.

"No. You startled me," she snapped back, crumpling the wet napkins into a ball and pushing them further down the table. "You were right, this was a bad idea." She slid out of the booth and stood to go, nearly knocking the approaching waitress off her balance as she rushed out of the coffee shop.

The perky woman raised an eyebrow, and Nick had no doubt that he and Constance would be back room gossip by the end of shift. 

"Can I get that to go?"


	11. Chapter 10

A/N: Thanks to thea for her proof-read of my shaky Latin skills. And my apologies for the late chapter, I have been disconnected from the internet because of the world's crappiest network. Should be back on track now.

* * *

__

Chapter 10

"Dr. Gilbert," Grissom said, nodding to the woman as he entered the tank. _Heather,_ he signed in greeting. _How are you? _

I'm good, she answered, but her hands were hesitant. _I don't understand. I answered all your questions at the museum._

"We've been going over the evidence, and we have a few more questions," Grissom said, speaking aloud for Brass's benefit.

__

I'm not a suspect, am I? Dr. Gilbert placed a comforting hand on Heather's shoulder. _I wouldn't even know how to hold a gun right. I've only seen them on TV._

"It's easier than you think," Brass said from where he was leaning by the window.

"Heather has already told you everything she knows," Dr. Gilbert said angrily, signing so that Heather could see what she was saying.

"We don't think she has," Grissom said slowly, watching Heather closely for her reaction to his words. She barely moved, but her eyes became guarded and her posture stiffened slightly. "Heather, did Constance Lowell leave the archives at all that night?"

__

Constance wouldn't kill anyone! Heather signed angrily, her gestures quick and abrupt.

Grissom weighed the importance of not revealing his whole hand, and his chances of getting Heather to cooperate if she thought she would be providing incriminating evidence on her friend. "No, we don't think she killed Louis Cavrel. But we do need to know if she left the room."

__

She may have left to go to the bathroom or something, Heather said. _It's not like I would have heard her leave,_ she added, and her gestures were openly challenging, as if she were throwing her disability in his face, and he was reminded that she was barely twenty and only recently deaf.

__

Heather, he signed firmly, not bothering to vocalize it, and making his displeasure known through his hands. "I'm not asking what she may have done. She wouldn't have left you alone without telling you. Did she leave the archives that night?"

Heather looked at Dr. Gilbert, who instructed her quickly in signs to answer the question, a look of concern on her face.

__

Yes, she signed, defeated.

"How long was she gone?"

__

A little while, Heather signed back with an insolent shrug.

"Heather." This time he said it out loud, counting on his lips to convey the level of his frustration with her.

__

Twenty-three minutes. It was before the time they said Mr. Cavrel was killed, though, she couldn't have had anything to do with it. Her words were frantic as she tried to convey the depth of her belief in her friend. 

"Did she come back with the cut on her head?" Brass asked, and Grissom translated.

Heather looked genuinely startled. _Cut? No, she was fine._

"Was she upset at all?"

__

Maybe. A little. I asked, and she said nothing was wrong, that she just had a headache. She took some aspirin and we went back to work. She didn't kill Mr. Cavrel, she reiterated. _She could never kill anyone._

"Yeah, that's what they always say," Brass commented cynically, and neither Grissom nor Dr. Gilbert felt the need to translate his words for Heather.

"May we go now?" Dr. Gilbert asked.

"Captain Brass is just going to ask her to put that information down in a written statement," Grissom told her, looking up with a frown when the door opened and Sara caught his attention. "I'll be right back."

In the hallway, Sara had the dictionary cradled in her arms, opened to the D section. "I made a list of all feminine words starting in di, du, or dy. There weren't as many as I thought there would be. Some of them didn't make any sense in the context, some of them didn't make any sense in the plural...long story short, one possibility was very interesting." She pointed to the list, where she'd underlined the word in red. "_Divitia_. Riches. All my riches. Grissom, the whole family was fighting tooth and nail over the will when Rose Galliard died. What if this was a will? What was she doing with all her money?"

"You said Ronnie thought the paper was in the archives?" Grissom asked, and she opened her mouth to protest the sharp about-face from her news, but answered him anyway.

"Yes..."

She barely had the word out of her mouth before Grissom was gone, back in the tank where Heather was writing her statement out for Brass. Dr. Gilbert and the homicide detective both looked up, startled, as he burst through the door. He caught Heather's attention and began signing quickly.

__

You said you have a photographic memory, he asked.

__

Yes, she confirmed warily.

__

Do you remember a document in Latin? He wrote totas meas down and slid the pad across for her to read. _It would have had these words at some point, followed by a word beginning in d._

She stared at the words, obviously confused as to why they would be asking her about this. _Yes, I remember it._ She froze, as something came to her. _I gave it to Mr. Cavrel. I marked it on the list of interesting things I'd come across that day, like I always do, and he came down the next day and asked for it. _

Did you give it to him?

Of course. He asked me to explain further what it was. Realization was slowly dawning. _Is this why someone killed him?_

We don't know, Grissom hedged. _What was it about?_

It was a will. She tapped the paper next to _divitia_ and spelled out the entire phrase that had come with it. _Totas meas divitias familiae dobo._

I will give all my riches to my family, Grissom translated. _You told him this?_

Yes. He said it didn't matter anyway, that the date was long before the will they had found when she died and it wouldn't make a difference. Heather seemed near tears. _Was he lying?_

I don't know, Grissom admitted, but his mind was racing. If the will Heather was talking about had been dated after the will that had split Rose Galliard's fortune between the Galliard foundation and her immediate family, then the Foundation would lose all its funding. Had Cavrel been trying to cover it up? Was that why he had burned the will? Had he burned it in front of his murderer, and had that been the act that had led to his murder? Images of the defensive wounds on Cavrel's wrist flashed before his eyes - the killer had tried to prevent him from burning the will.

"Brass," he barked without taking his eyes from Heather, "run a financial background check on all the members of the Galliard family. And I want a copy of Rose Galliard's will."

"Why? What is this all about?" Brass, who had been growing increasingly frustrated during the silent exchange, had finally reached the end of his rope. Grissom ignored him, and the homicide detective shook his head and picked up the in-house phone to bark instructions at the officer on the other end.

__

Could you write it out for us? Grissom handed her the pen and the pad of paper._ Take your time to make sure it's right._

She shot him a disparaging look and began to write in graceful, flowing strokes. She paused after the first sentence and put the pen down to sign to him. _This could take a while._

I'll wait, he promised.

~*~

Sara flipped through the case files, trying to block the image of the blood stain from her mind. She'd been so happy to find it - she'd been sure it belonged to the killer, brushing against the display on his way out through the fire door. She pulled out Constance Lowell's statement as she remembered how she had printed the door and the fire escape. In her mind, Constance Lowell's proud face morphed, and became Pamela Adler's, became Kaye Shelton's, and she -

__

No, she told herself firmly, gripping the folder tightly and closing her eyes. No.

A few breaths later, she was calm again, and she opened the file, scanning quickly for contact information. Balancing the folder against one hip, she pulled out her cell phone with the other and dialed the home number first, reasoning that the day after a murder, Constance wouldn't be at the museum.

"Lowell residence," the overly cheery voice answered.

"Hi, this is Sara Sidle with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. I was wondering if I could get in touch with Mrs. Lowell for just a few follow-up questions."

"I'm sorry, she isn't available at the moment."

"This is important," Sara said, becoming more than a little annoyed with the faceless maid on the other end of the line.

"I'm afraid it's going to have to wait," the woman snapped. "Mrs. Lowell is in the hospital."


	12. Chapter 11

_Chapter 11_

Nick came back to consciousness to the sound of his pager shrilling incessantly, and he flailed his arm out to stop the noise as if it were an alarm clock. He blinked to clear the blurriness from his eyes and recognized where he was just in time to evade the to-go coffee cup when he reached for the pager. His fingers closed over the plastic at the same time his cell phone began to ring. 

He swore aloud and abandoned the pager in search of the phone, which he finally found underneath the couch he had collapsed on. In reaching for it, he fell off the couch and onto his knees, hard, banging his elbow into the coffee table at the same time. 

"Stokes," he snarled, shaking out his arm to rid it of the tingles from hitting his funny bone.

"Hey, Nick, are you okay?" Sara's voice asked

His eyes found the clock - 2:32. Almost an hour. "I was asleep." He decided right then and there that if she pulled her typical 'I don't need sleep' routine he would petition Grissom to make sure she worked nothing but trick rolls for the next six months.

"Oh." She was silent for a few moments, and Nick could hear sounds of activity in the background - sounds that didn't belong to the forensics labs. "Listen, something's come up."

"Where are you?" he asked, taking the ice cold cup of coffee over to pour it down the sink.

"I'm at the hospital. Constance Lowell had an accident - she says she fell down the stairs," Sara said, her voice taut and angry.

"Oh, damn," he whispered, dropping the cup and screwing his eyes shut tightly. "Is she okay?"

"Mostly. Concussion, broken wrist and ribs. Bruises." Her voice was flat and emotionless, and he remembered what Brass had told him about Sara's confrontation of Scott Shelton - and he remembered how Constance had pulled her arm away from his touch. "She's - she's asking for you. Is there something..."

Sara didn't finish the sentence, would never pry like that, but he understood her question all the same. "She was at the museum when I went back to get the glove. I gave her my card." It would be prudent not to mention the meeting at the coffee shop for now. "You're at Desert Palms?"

"Yeah." The connection fuzzed as she covered the mouthpiece on her end, presumably to talk to someone. "Look, she's asleep now, so it's not pressing, but I wanted you to know."

"Give me a half hour," he promised, already unbuttoning his shirt with one hand as he headed toward the bedroom and the shower. "See you in a bit."

"Bye."

He tossed the shirt on the bed and hopped out of his pants on the way to one of the fastest showers he'd ever taken.

~*~

The medical tech flicked the light board on and began to slide the x-rays into the strip, one by one. Sara leaned forward, hands tucked in the back pockets of her jeans. It was like stepping back into the past, standing in the autopsy bay and looking at x-rays taken from Kaye Shelton's body, only this time there were relatively few broken facial bones. Photographs of the chest cavity and arms told the whole story - every rib had been broken at least once, and her currently broken wrist had a matched pair on the other arm.

"Dammit," she whispered. "_Damn_ him."

Her mind helpfully supplied the memory of the wedding pictures from the society page, James Lowell's gorgeous face smiling confidently. She brought her hands out of her pockets and traced a fractured rib with a finger, jerking back to ball both hands into fists, nails digging into her palms.

The med tech was silent beside her, letting the x-rays speak for themselves.

Constance Lowell was a society wife - it wouldn't do for her to constantly appear with bruises and cuts on her face. Her husband had confined his fists to the parts of her body that wouldn't show in case he needed her to function as a trophy on any given night. The facts were displayed in front of her in the clear black and white of Constance's bones, a logical progression of brutal abuse.

Her stomach churned, the coffee from Galliard's house its only contents, and she jerked her eyes away from the x-rays to see Nick standing in the door. He had obviously just arrived and was slightly out of breath.

"Hey." He placed a hand on her shoulder and she jumped away, an automatic reflex that he frowned at, sticking his hands in his pockets instead. "Those are Constance's x-rays?"

"Yeah," she said, studying the metal frame of the light board, willing herself to keep her eyes away from the x-rays. "Long-term and extensive."

"Where is he?" Nick's entire body was strained almost to the point of breaking.

"They haven't located him yet," and her voice suggested that for his safety, it was probably a good thing. Last time, Grissom had restrained her. From Nick's posture, she didn't think he would be a calming influence in the event that she found herself face to face with the man who had done this to his wife.

"Ms. Sidle?" An orderly poked his head into the small side room where they stood. "Mrs. Lowell is awake, and she's asking for Nick again."

At the sound of his name, Nick looked up quickly. "That's me. Can we see her?"

The man nodded. "Follow me."

~*~

"Just call me Santa Claus." Brass dropped the folder in the middle of Grissom's desk, and the entomologist looked up at him with annoyance. "Look who's got a whole graveyard full of skeletons in his closet."

"James Lowell," Grissom breathed, looking at withdrawal after withdrawal, thousands upon thousands of dollars. "Where is it all going?" He flipped to the next paper. "Ah."

"They don't call it the city of sin for nothing," Brass quipped. "Our poet raised the bar for high-rollers - hard to do. He not only managed to clean out his trust fund, he drained his wife's and had debts like you wouldn't believe."

"The fund for the Galliard Foundation is over twenty million dollars," Grissom reflected. Pieces were beginning to fall into place. "The will?"

"It's next. Date - March 10, 1985."

Grissom jerked his head up from the paper. "The paper can't date from before 1993, and Heather dated the Latin will as 1994."

"It's no good in court." He was stating the obvious and they both knew it.

"No, but it goes toward motive. It gives us something to work from. The blood in the gloves will give us the proof we need to convict." A cell phone rang, and both men checked their belts. "Mine."

"Hey, Grissom. I tried to get ahold of Constance Lowell, and she wasn't available." Sara sounded more than slightly distracted, and he frowned.

"And you need to _call_ me to tell me this because..."

"I'm at the hospital. Constance Lowell fell down the stairs." The bitter sarcasm in her voice had Grissom closing the folder and standing up to get ready to leave. "They took x-rays, and...it looks like we have two cases here instead of one."

"But maybe only one suspect," Grissom said, and covered the mouthpiece for a moment to address Brass. "Have Lowell brought in as soon as possible. We'll need a warrant for a DNA sample and a house search."

Brass snorted. "Already in progress. Where are you going?"

"To the hospital. Lowell might show up there before he comes here - get an officer and come with me."

"Grissom? Are you still there?" Sara asked when he brought the phone back to his ear. "What do you mean, one suspect?"

"James Lowell has a gambling problem, and you were right about the Latin - it was part of a will dated _after_ the will used to establish the Galliard Foundation." He passed the front desk and shouldered the outer doors open as he slid his sunglasses on. "For some reason, Rose Galliard had changed her mind and was going to leave all her money to her family."

"How did Lowell find out about that?" Sara wanted to know.

"That's what we're going to have to ask his wife," Grissom responded, opening the door to the Tahoe. "I'll be there soon." He flipped the phone shut and started the SUV as Brass and a uniformed officer came out of the building and entered a police car. He didn't bother to signal them and pulled out of the parking quickly.

~*~

"Nick."

He swallowed convulsively at Constance's weak smile. A deep purple bruise on her cheekbone stood in stark contrast against her pale skin. "Hey."

"What happened?" she asked, her eyes oriented toward him but unfocused from her concussion.

"Why don't you tell me?" he countered, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees and watching her face intently.

"I must have - I must have slipped, and fallen," she stammered, looking down at the cast on her wrist. "I really don't remember."

The concussion would interfere with memory, but it wasn't severe enough to block it completely. "They say you fell down the stairs."

"That must be it." She attempted a laugh but ground her teeth together when the movement jarred her ribs. "I'm not very coordinated."

"Constance." He rested his head in his hands and pressed his thumbs tightly against his jaw before looking back at her and continuing. "They took x-rays when you were admitted. You've broken more bones in the last five years than most people do in their lifetimes."

"I told you, I'm clumsy," she hedged. "What are you trying to say?"

"He can't keep doing this to you," Nick said angrily, abandoning the subtle approach. "It's not right."

"Who?" Constance parried, but she was fighting a losing battle and they both knew it. Her eyes flicked toward the door suddenly, and Nick turned in his seat to see Sara enter, her arms crossed.

"We all know who, Constance," Sara said, coming to stand by the bed, dark eyes fixed on Constance's pale blue.

"I fell," Constance repeated stubbornly, but tears began to shine.

"He helped you fall," Sara countered.

"Jamie loves me," she whispered brokenly.

"That's what he tells you," Sara shot back. "He doesn't. And he's going to keep hurting you. You can't keep pretending it's going to go away, because it's not."

Nick had the sudden impression that his presence was entirely superfluous, and the two women were holding another level of conversation apart from the one he was watching. He didn't move, barely breathed, only his eyes active as they alternated between Constance's trembling face and Sara's hard mask, her dark eyes completely emotionless.

Constance broke first, pressing her unbruised cheek into the pillow as she looked away from the two CSIs, her lips pressed into a thin line. Nick's hand reached out automatically to reassure Sara, who was so tense she was almost shaking, but he remembered how she had reacted in the x-ray room and stilled his hand before he touched her. The room was eerily silent except for the hum of the monitors.

The nurse chose that moment to enter the room, stopping at the threshold when she saw the scene within and then proceeding more cautiously. "Am I interrupting anything?" she asked, moving slowly to stand beside Sara as if she might spook her.

"No," Nick told her, attempting a reassuring smile. "We'll leave you to your work." This time he did take Sara's arm and she whipped around to look at him, her eyes burning into his as she yanked away from him. He held his hands in a non-threatening gesture. "Hey. Sar."

She seemed to come back then, and stalked out of the room ahead of him.


	13. Chapter 12

_Chapter 12_

"We'll get the bastard," Nick promised her. Sara didn't take her eyes from the Employee of the Month plaque on the wall. Dominique Henderson, with a lopsided grin and frizzed white hair. Third award in a row. 

She'd been staring at the wall for at least ten minutes now, and would probably ace a pop quiz on Desert Palms Trauma Unit Employees of the Month.

"Sara?"

"I heard you, Nick." Dominique had lost her place of honor to Lisa DeLuca the next year, who smiled with a mouth full of teeth bright against her sable skin. "They cleaned her up when she was admitted. There won't be any epithelials left."

"We'll get her to make a statement."

She shook her head distantly. "She won't."

He pounded one fist into the cheap end table, chivalrous Nick who had been doing this job longer than she had and was still surprised by human behavior.

"We'll get him for murder, though." Her own voice sounded far away, and the smile that crept across her lips had nothing to do with joy.

"We'll what?"

Sara finally turned to face him and somehow the sight of his stricken face calmed her, reached inside her and quieted the demons slightly. He was hurting for Constance, too. "I called Grissom before I came to find you. The paper scraps I found in the fireplace came from a will that was dated later than the will used to set up the Galliard Foundation - and in the more recent version, Rose Galliard left all her money to the family. James Lowell is in over his head in gambling debts."

Comprehension dawned on his face, followed swiftly by triumph. "They get him yet?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. Grissom is on his way here, though."

Nick nodded in satisfaction. "Murder one. He'll be away for a long time."

Sara wondered if it would be long enough.

~*~

Sara and Nick were sitting outside Constance Lowell's room when Grissom approached them, Brass and the officer trailing behind. Nick was hunched over and studying his shoelaces. Sara was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, in a posture that gave all the outward appearance of relaxation with none of the reality of it.

"Grissom." Nick shot to his feet. "Have you - "

Brass shook his head and answered the question before the younger CSI could answer it. "We haven't been able to get ahold of him yet."

"We think he'll come here first," Grissom added, watching Sara's still form. "Sara, can I talk to you for a second?"

She jerked her head up to look at him. "Yeah."

They walked a few feet off and Grissom wrapped his arms around the binder he was carrying, opening his mouth and then closing it as he searched for the right words.

"Look, I know what you're going to say," she said angrily. "Just - save it, okay?"

"Promise me you're not going to do something...ill-advised." The last word came out wrong, and he fidgeted and wished that for once he could find the right words around Sara.

She laughed hollowly. "They're just rabbits, Grissom. Nothing dangerous about rabbits."

"Sara..." He somehow managed to inflect a world of indecision and gentle reproach into her name. Once again, he cast around for the right words and once again they escaped him.

"Are we done?" she asked, fixing him with a look that made him feel like he was on the subject side of an experiment, and in the echo of her words he could hear her telling him he didn't feel anything.

This time he found the words, but still he kept them inside. Now was neither the time nor the place and it probably never would be. "Yes."

She left him standing there and went back to the chairs where she and Nick had been waiting, her back to him as she studied the plaques on the wall.

"Hey, Grissom." Brass motioned him over. "The nurse says we can talk to her now."

He nodded and followed the others into the hospital room, the officer staying outside to watch the door.

~*~

"Mrs. Lowell, we know you left the archives that night," Grissom said gently from where he stood by the bed, and Nick watched Constance's face intently.

"I may have gone to the bathroom at some point," she rejoined quizzically. "I don't see what that has to do with anything?"

"Beside the fact that your signed statement says you didn't leave the vault?" Brass asked her, and Nick glared at him across the hospital bed.

Grissom spoke again before Constance could reply. "We found blood in one of the collection rooms, and when we tested it against your brother Geoffrey's, it showed a first-degree relation. The only other people it could belong to are your brother Lucas and your parents - and your parents are in Europe. We're still trying to locate your brother, but I remembered that you had a cut that night."

Constance's hand good hand flew to her forehead to touch the cut. "I told you, I fell before I came into work."

Grissom shook his head. "This blood was fresh. It got there that night, and it got there when someone hit you and then pushed you into the display case. Did your husband come to visit you at work that night, Mrs. Lowell?"

She froze, then swallowed convulsively and turned to look at Nick before darting her eyes back to Grissom. "Jamie never visits me at the museum."

The entomologist nodded slowly. "All right. Let's try something else. Do you remember the day Heather found a Latin document in the archives?"

She sat up so quickly that she almost pulled the IV out of her arm, and fell backwards grimacing in pain when the movement shifted her broken ribs. Sweat beaded her forehead and she breathed shallowly for a moment before swallowing and speaking again. "Heather had nothing to do with this."

"I'm not asking about the murder," Grissom countered. "Do you remember the document, Mrs. Lowell?"

Constance eyed his suspiciously. "Yes."

"Louis Cavrel was particularly interested in it. Did you hear Heather explaining what it was to him?"

"Yes."

"Did you tell your husband about the document?"

"I may have...I don't remember. It was a while ago," she said vaguely.

"No," Grissom told her. "It was last week. It was a will, Mrs. Lowell, and it was dated after the will that was used when your grandmother died."

"I was never interested in the will. I only worry about the museum."

"And that's why we know you didn't kill Louis Cavrel," Grissom said with a faint smile. "But your husband was very interested in the will."

She seemed to gather herself to protest, but her eyes rested on Sara for a brief second and she sighed shallowly, careful not to disturb her ribs. "Yes. He and Geoffrey were always talking about it."

"What were the rumors you didn't want to tell me about, Constance?" Nick prodded gently from his side of the bed, ignoring Grissom's frown at his use of the given name.

She fastened her eyes on him. "That Louis had hidden the real will. That Grandmother had changed her mind about establishing the Foundation. But they were just words - there was no second will!" She caught herself. "But there is now."

"No, actually," Sara contradicted. "Someone burned it the night Louis Cavrel was killed."

"Here's what I think happened, Mrs. Lowell," Grissom said, and began to narrate the hypothetical events.


	14. Chapter 13

_Chapter 13_

_"Where's the will, Constance?" Jamie's hand gripped her forearm tightly, twisting viciously. _

_"What will?" she asked, bewildered._

_He backhanded her easily, his knuckles striking at her hairline in a practiced motion. She stumbled backward and glanced off the glass display case, finally coming to her hands and knees on the floor._

_"Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. And don't even think to lie to me. The second will, Constance. Your bitch of a grandmother's second will. Where is it?"_

_Constance shook her head blearily, one hand pressed against the open wound on her temple to stop the blood flow, the other cradled tightly against her chest. "Louis took it. He's had it since we found it."_

_"Louis..." His voice was considering, calculating. "Of course. Full circle. He hid it, and now that it's come to light again he's trying to hide it again."_

_Constance managed to pull herself to her feet, weaving slightly._

_"Go clean up," he told her, his lip curled with disdain. "You look horrible."_

_He left her in the dark collection room, exiting with purposeful strides._

~*~

"Are you following me so far?" Grissom asked, but Constance didn't answer, her lips pressed thin.

~*~

_"Hey, Geoff," Jamie said with a grin. "Listen, I forgot my wedding ring downstairs the other day. Took it off before our bout. Constance just noticed and she's going to kill me if I don't get it back right away - mind if I run down and get it?"_

_Geoffrey chuckled and let his brother-in-law in. "Harvard MBA, Jamie, and you'd forget your own head if it weren't attached."_

_"I like to be consistent," he laughed back. "Thanks. Hey, listen - you up for a bout later tonight?"_

_Geoffrey checked his watch. "I'll put Patrick to bed at around eight. Nine work for you?"_

_"A little later, maybe. I've got a business dinner at the Bellagio until eleven or so. Say midnight?"_

_He hesitated. "That's late, but...yeah, it works. See you then."_

_Jamie waved to confirm as he descended to the basement. Once there, he took his wedding ring out of his pocket and slipped it back on his finger, humming as he opened the ski closet and selected a pair of gloves to put into his briefcase._

~*~

Constance still refused to react, but her eyes were beginning to show understanding and fear. Nick wanted to reach down and touch her hand to comfort her, but he didn't dare while Grissom was still in the building.

~*~

_Jamie opened and closed drawers swiftly, the ski gloves bulky and hot. In the bottom of the right-hand drawer he found the revolver, and staring at it for a moment, took it out to set on the floor by his knee._

_"Where is it, Cavrel?" he asked himself softly, careful not to alert the staff members working down the hall._

_Something caught his eye underneath the desk and he reached back, patting with his hand to see if maybe there was something taped underneath. He felt the crack in the wood, and he smiled tightly, scrabbling with his fingers for purchase, trying to dig his nails into the crack through the fabric._

_"What are you doing here?" Cavrel hissed from the door._

_Jamie jerked back, his glove catching on the corner of the the compartment and tearing. He stood slowly, gun in hand, keeping it out of sight. "Where is it, Cavrel?" he repeated, addressing the man in person this time._

_"Where is what?"_

_"Don't play coy with me," Jamie snarled. "The will. Rose Galliard's second will. I don't know how you buried it the first time, but it's not going to stay hidden this time. Give it to me."_

_"This?" Cavrel reached into his suit coat pocket and unfolded a piece of paper slowly, a sly smile on his face. "This will never see the light of day." He stepped toward the fireplace, embers glowing slightly from the fire that had gone out while he'd left the room. The paper dangled from his fingers - and dropped._

_In that instant, Jamie lunged forward, grabbing Cavrel's wrist, trying to pull him backward. Too late - the dry paper fell onto the embers and caught fire almost immediately, flashing into nothingness in seconds._

_Jamie abandoned Cavrel's wrist for his left shoulder, yanking him forward and bringing the gun up. He paused for one, long moment of harsh breathing and eyes meeting along the barrel of the gun, and then he fired directly into Cavrel's face, stepping backward and letting the body drop to the floor face-first._

_He stood for only a split second, shaking slightly, and dropped the gun next to the body, crossing the room quickly to put his fist through the window, followed by his elbow to increase the hole. Voices came down the hallway, and he moved faster, to the fireplace to see if any part of the will had survived, and then pressing the secret button. He closed the door just as Walter Green and Tom Daley entered the room._

_"Oh my God, Louis! Holly, call 911!"_

_Jamie waited in the closet and stripped his gloves off. He stared at the right glove for a moment, spattered with gun powder and torn at the finger, and with a calculating smile, let it fall. Misdirection of evidence was often better than absence of evidence, or so Geoff was always saying._

~*~

Constance had started crying silently somewhere around the middle of Grissom's description, small individual tears that she wiped away angrily as they fell. "Jamie wouldn't frame Geoffrey. Never. They're like brothers."

"Of the Cain and Abel variety, perhaps," Grissom said gently.

"And it's my fault. I convinced Geoffrey to - it's my fault."

The CSIs exchanged confused glances. "What do you mean?" Nick prompted.

She drew in a shuddering breath. "I had talked to Louis the day before. I told him that I wanted the will destroyed. We've never needed money, and the Foundation, and the museum - it's done so much good. I don't know why Grandmother changed her mind, but I didn't want the museum to lose all its funding. And then I went to talk to Geoffrey. I convinced him to call Louis and tell him to get rid of the will. He was so angry that I'd kept it from him, but he agreed. Six years had passed...the Foundation became his passion, too. Jamie must have...he was in the other room, playing with Patrick. We were talking quietly, but not that quietly." The words spilled out of her in a rush, and she looked up at them with haunted eyes. "It's my fault."

"No, it's not," Sara told her, shaking her head. "You didn't do anything wrong."

Constance looked like she would object, but a loud voice from outside the door interrupted her.

"What do you mean, I can't see my wife? Who do you think you are? Get out of my way!"

The officer was trying in vain to restrain James Lowell, who was growing progressively more angry and violent. "Let me in!"

Brass nodded to the officer, who stepped back and Lowell fell a few steps into the room, favoring the officer with a glare as if blaming him for his undignified entrance.

"Who the hell are you people, and why are you in my wife's hospital room?" He strode forward angrily, and Nick saw Constance cringe against the pillow, paling.

"We're with the Las Vegas Crime Lab, Mr. Lowell," Grissom said mildly.

"Crime Lab? Constance didn't have anything to do with that," Lowell blustered. "I want you out of here, now."

"Of course." Lowell preened at Grissom's easy acceptance, but froze when he heard the next words. "But we're going to need a DNA sample from you first."

"Whether we do that out in the hallway for everyone to see, or here in the room, is your choice," Brass added helpfully. "And if you could tell us where you were last night at ten o'clock without the necessity of an appointment down at the station, that would be helpful too."

Lowell's eyes darted from the two men to Nick and Sara, seemingly deciding he was safer with the older men than the young CSIs, both of whom seemed right on the edge of violence. "I was at the Bellagio until around eleven thirty. Business dinner."

"Care to tell us with whom?"

"It's a private matter. The deal isn't ready to go public yet, and my future partner would prefer his name not be broadcast." Lowell's air was haughty as he spat the words out.

"And yet you ate at the Bellagio. Fancy that." Brass favored him with a small, cold smile. "And the DNA sample."

"I may not have the law degree in the family, but I know you need a warrant for that."

Brass took great pleasure in flourishing the sheet of paper under Lowell's nose, who blanched slightly, but ground his teeth and worked his jaw muscles. "Fine. Whatever."

Grissom took the sample using the evidence kit he'd brought up with him, and when he had finished jerked his head for Nick and Sara to follow him out of the room. They did so, reluctantly.

"We can't just leave him in there with her!" Nick exploded once they reached the hallway, forcing the words angrily through gritted teeth so he didn't shout them.

"We can't do anything else," Grissom countered swiftly. "She says she fell down the stairs."

"We all _know_ - " Sara began, but Grissom cut her off before she could go any further.

"Evidence, Sara. Evidence." The look on her face said she wanted to tell him exactly what he could do with that evidence, but she didn't say anything and he continued. "We'll get him on murder, and he'll never touch her again. Go to the Bellagio. Brass will have a warrant waiting for you to pick up at the station. Nick, take this sample to Greg. Do not leave his side until it's processed and call me with the results."

Nick nodded and took the sample from Grissom, leaving at a walk so fast it was nearly a trot. Sara remained, looking at the now closed door that led to Constance's hospital room, obviously torn. 

"She'll be okay, Sara," Grissom said softly. "It's a public place. He can't hurt her here."

"Yeah. I know." She stared at the door for a few more seconds as if she could penetrate the wood, and then shook herself. "The Bellagio."

"The Bellagio," Grissom confirmed. "Casinos record everything that goes on in public areas. I'm betting James Lowell had no idea he was being filmed." He raised an eyebrow. "If he was even there."

She grinned at him fiercely in triumph and took off, not bothering to stay at a walk.


	15. Chapter 14

_Chapter 14_

"I have to tell you, with all the blood you've been sending my way from this case, I think I need a raise." 

Greg and Nick sat shoulder to shoulder, arms crossed. "Talk to Grissom about it."

"Yeah, right."

Silence reigned for a few moments, or the closest approximation thereof possible in the busy forensics labs. Phones ringing, people talking, doors opening and closing, the whirls and clicks of lab equipment - and the buzz of a printer.

Nick jumped off the stool behind Greg and nearly careened into the lab tech from his momentum. Greg held up a reproachful hand and scanned the sheet. "You've got him. Blood from the gloves is a thirteen-marker match to James Lowell's DNA."

"You'll never touch her again," Nick whispered under his breath, drawing a shuddering breath of relief as Greg handed him the sheet to see for himself. "Thanks, Greg."

~*~

"I have no intention of violating the privacy of my patrons in this manner," the manager of the Circo scoffed. "Jeremy - come here," he snapped, gesturing to a waiter as the young man passed by. "Jeremy is Mr. Lowell's usual server. He can answer any questions you may have."

The college-aged waiter's eyes darted nervously from Sara to his boss, and he shifted his weight slightly to better accomodate the full tray of empty dishes he had balanced against his hip. "Questions?"

"Was James Lowell here last night?" Sara decided to play along with the manager's game, if only for a few seconds, as she fingered the paper of the warrant in her jacket pocket. Galliard money greased the wheels of the justice system like nothing else - she couldn't remember faster authorizations than the ones they'd had in this case.

Jeremy's head bobbed, and he re-shifted his weight, obviously straining under the tray. "Yes. He took his usual table." His chin jerked in the direction of a table for two by a window overlooking the fountains outside.

"When was he here?" She swept her eyes around the room, then up to the jointure between ceiling and wall, tagging the discreetly placed security cameras.

A rolling shrug that threatened to send all of the dishes crashing to the floor. The manager glared at the waiter, and he cringed in turn before he seemed to remember that Sara had addressed him with a question. "He - ah - maybe around seven-thirty?"

Sara worried a corner of the folded paper between index finger and thumb as she nodded absently along with Jeremy's words, her mind calculating angles. By her count, there should be at least two cameras with a full view of Lowell's table, and three more with at least a partial view. "And what time did he leave?"

"I, um, I'm not sure. I mean, it was a busy night. There's the television convention in town, and Robbie was out sick and I had to cover his tables, and..." At Sara's no-nonsense look, he gulped deeply and plowed on. "He and Mr. MacMahon called for the check, and then they had coffee, and I checked the table right before I went on break. At ten-thirty. They were gone."

"He charged the meal?" Sara's eyes narrowed in interest.

"Mr. Lowell has an account here," the manager interrupted smoothly. "He is a frequent and valued guest. If that is all, Jeremy needs to get back to work."

"He can go," Sara said, and the waiter sighed in relief and left with the tray, nearly bobbling the load when he had to swerve to avoid a busboy. "I have a warrant here for the surveillance tapes from last night between the hours of six o'clock and midnight." She handed him the piece of paper with a thin, tight stretching of lips that wasn't really a smile.

The manager scrutinized the warrant with angry eyes, finally refolding it with a jerky movement that nearly tore the paper. "Very well. I'll take you to the security offices myself."

~*~

"Grissom."

The entomologist pressed the cell phone to his ear as he climbed the wide steps that led to the second floor of the Lowell residence. The entire effect was ostentatious to the point of absurdity and put Grissom in mind of the entrance foyer to an opera rather than a house.

"Hey, Griss, we got a match." The triumph in Nick's voice carried even through the crackle of the bad connection.

"Are you outside ballistics?" Grissom yelled into the mouthpiece, his voice echoing in the emptiness of the entry. "Nick?"

"Yeah - checking - Bobby - loose ends - " The static gave one final burst and the line was lost completely. Grissom took the phone from his ear to stare at it for a moment, then shook his head and closed it, putting it away.

"I'm telling you, these people have too much money on their hands," Brass snorted, examining a banister composed of four different types of marble. "That Nick?"

"The DNA is a match," Grissom relayed. "Where are we going?"

"Up here, according to the maid. Master suite is - this way." They climbed the last few steps, turned right, and Brass shouldered his way through a set of double doors.

Grissom passed him and headed for the back of the suite, pulling on gloves as he went. The first door was a small walk-in closet filled with women's suits and dresses, the lower area given over to shoes. He surveyed the space briefly before closing the door again and moving to the next door - an enormous bathroom. The last door was a second walk-in closet, bigger than the first by half again. "His closet is bigger than hers?"

"That's a first," Brass snarked, looking over Grissom's shoulder at the neatly arranged rows of suits. "Does any man really need that many pairs of shoes?"

"Apparently," Grissom observed, kneeling down and sliding his evidence kit over to him to begin printing the shoes. "This will take a while."

"I'll go see what the staff can tell us about Lowell's whereabouts last night."

Grissom didn't reply, already focused on the task of logging each shoe tread into evidence. Over thirty pairs of extremely expensive pairs of shoes later, he stood, stretching slightly to relieve the tension in his back from kneeling so long. With a flashlight, he began to methodically check the sleeves of every black suit jacket in the closet.

It was over a half an hour later when Brass returned. "Find anything?"

"No," Grissom said in frustration, flicking the flashlight off. "Not a single one of these sleeves is torn."

"I think I might have the answer to that." Brass stepped aside to reveal a nervous young woman, her dark eyes watching the criminologist and the detective worriedly. "Tell Mr. Grissom what you just told me."

"Mr. Lowell returned at almost midnight," she began. "He changed and left again - he said he would be at Mr. Galliard's until late, and that we were not to wait up for him."

Grissom stepped forward eagerly, and the woman jumped back slightly, startled by his sudden energy. "What did you do with the clothes he was wearing when he arrived?"

"I put them with the clothes to go out to dry-cleaning," she explained. "I would have done it anyway, but I remember that the jacket smelled - smokey. I thought it might be because he had been at a business dinner. Mr. Galliard, he doesn't like the smell of cigarette smoke, so I always know to send those suits straight to dry-cleaning." She paused in remembrance. "It didn't...it didn't smell like cigarettes, though."

"GSR," Grissom breathed. "Do you remember if the suit had a tear on one of the sleeves?" At her nod, he barreled on. "And where is it now?"

"I told you, I put it with the dry-cleaning. It's picked up every afternoon; he was late today, he just came by an hour ago."

Grissom's jaw worked for a split-second before snapping shut. "Which dry cleaner? Where?"

"D'Amato's, on Bank Street..." She trailed off as the entomologist bolted from the room.

~*~

Nick settled into the chair in the break room wearily, slumping down and leaning his head back, eyes closed.

"Hey."

He opened one eye a crack to see Catherine standing at his shoulder and grunted a noncommital response. 

"How much sleep have you had?" she asked, and the gears in his brain finally turned to tell him that if Catherine was here, it was almost the start of shift.

"An hour or so." The few sips of coffee he'd had on the way home from meeting with Constance were the last caffeine he'd had, and his fogged mind was truly beginning to regret that.

Catherine sighed. "Get some sleep. Here, stretch out on the couch."

Nick eyed the tiny couch. "I don't think stretch is the right word." She just crossed her arms and looked at him in the way he imagined she looked at Lindsey sometimes. "We're on a case. Grissom's getting clothes for a fiber match and Sara's breaking the suspect's alibi. They're going to be bringing him in soon."

"And what are you doing?" Catherine asked pointedly. 

Nick looked down at the folder he'd put on the table when he came in; official ballistics reports. Together with any GSR Grissom was able to collect from the suits they would provide direct evidence that Lowell had fired the gun that had killed Cavrel; the fibers and the DNA were only circumstantial evidence without the direct chain of action leading to the murder. "I'm..." He faltered.

"Sleeping," Catherine finished, pointing to the couch.

He looked at her, now mildly annoyed. "I'm going to go collect reports from Greg and call - another witness." He stopped himself just before saying Constance's name. Bad enough that Sara knew about his conflict of interest; he could only hope it wouldn't come up at trial. Calling her now probably wasn't the best idea, but his gut had been churning since he'd left her alone in the hosptial room with her husband. He had to know she was all right - Grissom's rational assurances that he wouldn't hurt her in a public area aside.

He ignored Catherine's exasperated sigh as he lurched to a standing position and left the room.

~*~

"There." Sara reached over the tech's shoulder to tap the screen as the grainy figure of James Lowell sat down, and the man stopped the tape accordingly. "Time?"

"Seven twenty-seven," the tech read off, and Sara nodded. So far, right in line with the waiter's story. "All right, how long was he there?"

The tech flipped the tape into a faster speed, and they watched as Senator Robert MacMahon sat down a few minutes after Lowell, and they proceeded to talk animatedly through aperatif, appetizer, main course, and dessert. Their words and gestures had calmed down by dessert, and they were leaned back in their chairs chatting affably by the time the coffee arrived. Lowell said something to Jeremy, who noted on the bill and nodded, smiling.

Sara marked down the time; she would check it against Lowell's credit card charges later. Nine twenty-two. "C'mon," she whispered, willing them to finish their coffee, willing Lowell to leave in time to be at the Galliard Museum by ten o'clock. "There - stop there." Nine forty-seven. "Got you, you bastard."

"Excuse me?" The tech looked up at her, startled.

"Nothing," she told him brusquely, straightening up. "I'm going to need this tape." The tech popped it out and handed it to her, and she marked it into evidence. "Thanks for your help."

"You're welcome," the tech replied, obviously still confused, but Sara was already out the door.

She pulled out her cell phone as she walked through the casino floor to get to the lobby, ignoring the bright lights. "Grissom - I've got the tape. He left at nine forty-seven. I'm going to do a little experiment and see if I can make it to the Galliard Museum in ten minutes."

"Brass and I are on the way to the dry cleaner's. Apparently the maid sent the suit Lowell was wearing out with the laundry." Grissom's voice contained a world of frustration with people who would destroy evidence like that, and Sara found herself nodding unconsciously.

"Meet you back at the lab," she responded, flipping the phone shut and exiting the Bellagio into the crisp air of early evening.


	16. Chapter 15

_Chapter 15_

Nick shrugged into his jacket as he waited for the call to connect, sitting outside on a bench he knew Sara snuck to sometimes for cigarette breaks. He ground one butt beneath his foot absentmindedly. 

"Desert Palms County Hospital," the receptionist answered.

"Yes, hi," he said, kicking the remains of the butt hard enough to send them scattering into the street. "I'd like to speak to a Constance Lowell. She's in room four seventeen."

"One moment please."

He found another cigarette butt and began grinding it into non-existance as the world's most generic hold music chimed in his ear.

"Hello?"

"Constance, hey," he said, jumping to his feet, cigarette butt forgotten. "I was just - um, I just wanted to check up on you." 

There was a long silence on the other end, and he began to wonder if maybe she didn't want him calling. He was about to apologize and hang up when she spoke again. "I'm fine."

"Okay. Good," he replied, relieved that she'd spoken and angry with himself for feeling like a teenager asking out his first girl. Words completely failed him, and he finally managed to stutter out something of an apology - for what, he wasn't exactly sure.

"It's fine," she repeated, distant, and then she seemed to return to the present a little more. "I'm probably not making much sense...they've got me on some stuff for my wrist and my ribs."

Nick was irrationally relieved that her distance was due to the painkillers and not any particular objection to his call. "Oh. Oh, I'm - " He caught himself. "I'll let you get some sleep."

"Yeah," she replied vaguely. "'Bye."

"'Bye," he whispered into the already broken connection. He sat down heavily on the bench, phone slung between his hands, elbows resting on his knees.

"Grissom is always telling me not to let it get personal," Sara said, and somehow he wasn't surprised that she would show up just then, boots scraping across the concrete as she came over to him and sat down, her shoulder brushing his. "He told me once that if I didn't let go, I'd spend all my time in the hospital trying to help the ones I couldn't save." She snorted softly, a half-chuckle full of sarcasm. "It's never just that easy."

Nick raised his head when a police vehicle drove by, and then dropped it again to look at his cell phone. "You ever feel a connection with somebody? Just - bam, right there?"

Sara whipped her head toward him, but he didn't turn to return the regard, still studying the buttons of his phone. One of the night beat cops left the building and stood a few yards off, lighting up a cigarette before going on duty. After nearly a full minute, Sara turned back to looking at the ground in front of the bench. "Yeah," she said, so softly he almost didn't catch it.

He nodded, lips pressed tight. "Yeah," he echoed, and knew it was time to stop talking about the subject altogether before it put them both in realms that could get them in trouble.

They sat together in silence as it grew dark. The outside lights flicked on, filling the air with the hum of flourescent bulbs.

Nick leaned back against the bench, looked up at the blackening sky, and wished that he could see the stars.

~*~

"Stop!" Grissom barreled through the door of the laundromat, Brass huffing behind him. The attendant behind the cash register and the two other customers looked up, startled, and Brass flashed his bag in explanation.

"You have to stop the rack," Grissom repeated urgently. "Now."

"Look, I don't know who you think you are," the man began angrily, "but you have no right - "

"There is evidence of a murder on one of those suits." Grissom jabbed his finger toward the rotating rack. "If you do not stop the rack right now, it will be lost, and a killer might go free."

The attendant's eyes widened, suitably impressed, and he reached underneath the desk to press the button that halted the machines.

Grissom relaxed visibly. "Thank you. I need to see the clothes that came in from the Lowell household. They would have arrived about an hour ago."

"Sorry for the inconvenience," Brass murmured to the customers standing in line, their mouths agape. "This won't take long."

"Sure, yeah," the man said, and gestured toward a swinging door that would let the investigators behind the desk. "Back here." He led them to a rolling rack filled with suits and dress shirts and a few articles of women's clothing. "It was next to go in. You got lucky."

Grissom was already pulling on gloves and reached forward to pull up the plastic on suit after suit, scanning the sleeves.

"Hey, don't you need a warrant or something?" the attendant suddenly realized. "I mean, that's not my stuff, and my boss is gonna be pretty upset if - "

"Captain Brass!" The young officer standing at the counter held up a sheet of paper. "They told me to meet you here with this?"

Brass raised an eyebrow at the attendant and crossed to the front of the store to get the warrant. "Thanks, Wilkins." He passed the warrant on to the man with a smug smile. "Here you are."

Behind them, Grissom lifted a suit off the rack, turning the hanger so he could balance the suit horizontally. He slid the plastic up carefully and reached for a flashlight. In the added light, the gray particles of gunpowder flickered clearly against the black cloth. He smiled in satisfaction. "We'll be taking this back to the lab with us."


	17. Chapter 16

_Chapter 16_

James Lowell was the picture of composure as he sat at the bare table in the interrogation room. Sara decided the four-thousand-an-hour lawyer sitting next to him had something to do with that. 

"I'm afraid I don't entirely understand what you're talking about," he said smoothly, his voice tinny as it carried through the two-way glass.

Grissom leaned forward. "It's not a difficult question. How did you know about the secret closet?"

"My client has already stated that he has no familiarity with this secret closet you're talking about, Mr. Grissom," the impeccably tailored lawyer interrupted. "Move on, please."

"Fine." Grissom leaned back once again. "When did you injure your hands, Mr. Lowell?"

Once again, the lawyer spoke for Lowell. "Mr. Lowell has already answered that question. If you are simply going to ask the same questions repeatedly, then we have no reason to be here."

Lowell held up one hand, the picture of graciousness as he turned to smile at Grissom. "Carl, I'll answer his question if he feels that a second statement of the facts will help him find who murdered Louis. As I told you, I boxed with my brother-in-law Geoffrey last night at midnight. Bare knuckles. I have no doubt that if you speak to Geoff, he will confirm the fact that I was there." The smile grew wider. "And I dare say he has his own set of injured hands."

"No," Grissom said mildly. "I meant, how did you re-injure them?"

Sara's lips quirked into a satisfied smile, and beside her, Nick whispered "Gotcha" under his breath.

"What?" Lowell said, obviously startled.

"The human body follows a set timeline when responding to a cut," Grissom explained. "Clotting begins immediately, and over a period of time, closes the wound with a scab until the skin regrows. Am I correct in assuming that you don't suffer from any disease that would prevent blood clotting - hemophilia, for example?"

"I do not," Lowell answered cautiously, his gray eyes narrowed.

Grissom nodded, as if to himself. "An injury as minor as a skinned knuckle would scab over within a very short time - a matter of hours. If you first injured your knuckles between the hours of midnight and one o'clock this morning, your knuckles would be well on their way to healing. Instead, you have fresh wounds. Why is that?"

Criminalist and suspect regarded each other across the bland table, and there was no doubt in Sara's mind that James Lowell knew he had lost, even if he refused to admit it openly. And he probably never would. With the DNA evidence linking him to the gloves - a subject his lawyer had rigorously enforced the Fifth Amendment in regards to - his only decision would be whether to claim self-defense or plead guilty right away and hope his family's money could buy him a deal.

"Does this have pertinence to the murder of Louis Cavrel?" was the lawyer's question.

"It was an observation, Mr. Gerhardt," Grissom rejoined. "Mr. Lowell was not being entirely truthful when he told us how he injured his hands."

"If it happened, as you yourself stated, after the time period you are concerned with for the murder, then it has no bearing in this questioning and I see no reason to stay here." Gerhardt stood, and Lowell stood as well, his eyes never leaving Grissom's face. They exited, and behind Grissom, Brass sighed heavily.

"He did it," Nick said beside her.

"You were doubting?"

"Innocent until proven guilty," he reminded her halfheartedly.

She snorted. "Yeah."

"Though it is too bad the DA wouldn't try for an arrest warrant until he got a chance to tell his side of the story," Nick mused, and grinned at her when she turned to gape at him. She nudged him with her shoulder, and his grin turned into a smirk.

"The DA doesn't want the wrath of both the Galliard and Lowell families on her head," Grissom said from the doorway. "Politics. But Brass is on his way now to submit the paperwork. He had no way to explain his blood in the glove that was used to fire the gun, or the gunshot residue on his suit."

The lights in the interrogation room flicked off, plunging them all into semi-darkness.

"Dinner?" Grissom suggested, pushing off from the door frame with his shoulder. "My treat."

"You're on," Nick said. "Let me make a phone call, and I'll meet you in the parking lot."

~*~

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Lowell is sleeping right now." The maid's voice told Nick all what he needed to know about the impropriety of calling Constance at home.

"Could you just let her know I called?" He'd wanted to break the news to her in person - figuratively speaking.

"I will." There was a click, and he was left with dial tone. Nick stared at the cell phone in bemusement for a few seconds, and shook his head.

"You're too late, Nick, I already called shotgun," Sara teased, hopping into the passenger side door of the Tahoe as he approached.

He resisted the urge to stick his tongue out at her. "I'll try not to let it break my heart."

"Are you two done?" Grissom asked in the mildly annoyed tone he reserved for when he was actually rather amused at their antics.

"Drive on, boss."

_fin._

* * *

**A/N:** Just to address quickly to some of the comments. I know nothing about Deaf culture, or ASL, apart from a rather vague ability to spell my first name in ASL. There is a sequel plotted out, but don't look for it for several more months; I've got quite a lot of other writing to get through before then. If you want updates on any of those fics, check out my website as listed under my profile. Hope you enjoyed the ride!


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